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REMARKS 



SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION 



" The Planters may be entitled to the praise of almost heroic virtue, when they 

conduct themselves vrith benevolence and justice towards the unhappy beings 

committed to their care. But they must not expect us to trust a great body of 

our fellow subjects to the safeguard of heroic virtue. We trust men to the 

protection of law ; we trust them to the arm of Government ; we trust them to 

a coincidence of interest ; we trust them to a sympathy of feeling, and an identity 

of interest 5 we cannot trust them to that which is so rare ; which is admirable, 

and consequently which is rare ; and which can form no security at all for the 

well being of a multitude of men." 

Sir J. Mackintosh. 



BOSTON: 

HILLIARD, GRAY, AND COMPANY. 

1834. 



REMARKS 



ON 



SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION 



" The Planters may be entitled to the praise of almost heroic virtue, when they 
conduct themselves with benevolence and justice towards the unhappy beings 
committed to their care. But they must not expect us to trust a great body of 
our fellow subjects to the safeguard of heroic virtue. We trust men to the 
protection of law ; we trust them to the arm of Government ; we trust them to 
a coincidence of interest ; we trust them to a sympathy of feeling, and an identity 
of interest ; we cannot trust them to that which is so rare ; which is admirable, 
and consequently which is rare ; and which can form no security at all for the 

well being of a multitude of men," 

Sir J. Mackintosh. 



REMARKS 



There are those among us who seem to think the 
time ere long coming, when, by the gentle but irresisti- 
ble influence of natural causes, slavery will cease to 
exist in any civilized land. Slavery, they say, is an 
institution containmg within itself the elements of its 
own dissolution, and, do what we may, the time will 
soon come, when all men, whatsoever be their color, will 
rejoice in the light of liberty. There are many, also, 
who think it doubtful, whether any steps taken by the 
inhabitants of the non-slaveholding States of the Union, 
to promote this much desired result, will not rather re- 
tard, than accelerate it. To some of these propositions 
I give a free assent ; to others, only a qualified one. 

In the institution of slavery as established by law and 
custom in our Southern States, it is not easy to see any 
elements of dissolution, unless this be a violent one, 
produced by reaction on the part of the slave. If it is 
meant that there is a point, beyond which human nature 
will not endure restraint or coercion, and that slavery 
upon its present system will at some period or other 
reach it, and that then the slave will free himself by his 
own power to will and to do ; of this the possibility is 
admitted. But the existence of elements of dissolution, 
such as these, presents no argument in favor of inaction 
or indifference ; but, on the contrary, a very strong one 
for attention and timely provision. There is, indeed, 
nothing in the laws or the public sentiment of the slave- 
holding States of the Union, which betokens, either at a 
near or a distant period, the peaceful termination of 
slavery.* On the contrary, nothing can be more certain 
or plainer than that, on this point, their laws are each 

' Kentucky may aflbrd an exception. 

A 



2 SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION. 

year growing more rigorous and despotic, restricting the 
blacks more and more in their means of instruction, and 
in one State at least, depriving the whites of the power 
of adequate inquiry and remonstrance. It is true, that 
debate in the Virginia Legislature, two years ago, was 
by many thought a mighty sign of the times, and, without 
question, an event seriously affecting the continuance of 
slavery in the United States. It was the result of a 
strong and very general excitement caused by the in- 
surrection and massacre at South Hampton, and called 
forth many warm and eloquent advocates of negro free- 
dom. It seemed, indeed, an event pregnant with great 
things for Virginia, but it resulted in Tiothing. Yet had 
it ended as the most zealous friend of the blacks could 
have desired, had it made the soil of Virginia a home 
only for the free, slavery would still remain elsewhere, 
almost unchanged in its fortunes, at once the curse and 
the reproach of the white man, the grievous wrong and 
burthen of the black. 

With regard to the proposition, that any part taken in 
behalf of abolition, by the inhabitants of the free States, 
will be as likely to do harm as good, there is more to be 
said. 

The writer is fully aware of the danger of exciting 
anger or ill-will among the inhabitants of the South, by 
any attempt at interference, which may even appear to 
assume undue authority. He fully acknowledges, that 
the condition of the free and slave colored population, 
within its own limits, is a matter over which each State 
has the indisputable and undivided control. It is in 
relation to this subject a foreign State to the rest of the 
Union. On this point, at least. State sovereignty has 
never been and cannot be questioned. Still, has the 
North no interest in the question, and can there be no 
legitimate influence but through the ballot box? As 
fellow-citizens of this federal republic, have we no in- 
terest in the prosperity of the masters, — as fellow-men, 
have we no concern for the well-being of the slaves '? 
Is the voice of humanity to be hushed, the voice of 
friendly warning and entreaty dumb, because we our- 
selves are not slave-holders, or because legislative inter- 



INTEREST AND INFLUENCE OF THE NORTH. .3 

ferencc is out of the question ? Must appenls to con- 
science and reason be fruitless and worse than fruitless, 
because we are bound by peculiar ties, and yet not 
wholly one ? Is public opinion nothinijr ? Will the unani- 
mous sentiment of the civilized world be of no avail ? 
To what else, than these, do we owe the great and 
advancing triumph of the cause of Temperance ? What 
other is the influence now regenerating, as we trust, the 
bodies politic of Western Euroixj, than that of public 
opinion without, on public opinion within each indepen- 
dent community 1 And by what magic circle are the 
slave States of this Union surrounded, that they alone 
shall escape this influence? Finally, we would ask, 
*' where in the literature of the whole world, where in 
the public opinion of the whole world, where in the 
religion of the whole world," does the slaveholder find 
an ally or an advocate, if not in the non-slaveholding 
States of the Union. It has been said, indeed, that men 
have never eiiiancipated their slaves, but when it was 
their interest to do so. But have they always done so 
then, and is it not their interest now? Was it the 
enlightened self-interest of the West India planters, or 
the public opinion of Great Britain, which procured the 
passage of the Abolition Act ? Every one knows it was 
the latter, and yet slavery has long been profitless to 
the British colonies. 

There is, to be sure, a very peculiar jealousy of North- 
ern influence on this question, and with some at the 
South, any arguments, though addressed, as all ought 
to be, solely to the masters, may create only a spirit of 
opposition. It is difficult to believe, however, that this 
will be the case with all, or even a greater part of our 
Southern brethren. If, then, we think that slavery is 
morally wrong ; that it is the duty of every slaveholder 
to emancipate his slaves, and of every legislature ajt once 
to remove the sanction of the law, from the principle 
that man can hold property in man, it is both our right 
and duty to say so, and no fair or honorable men ought 
to object to it. 

There is one circumstance, however, which, viewed in 
its proper light, gives to the citizen of every State in the 



4 SLAVERY UNDER THE LAWS 

Union an equal right to think and speak, and a similar 
power to act upon this question. Slavery exists in the 
several States, at the will of their respective legislatures. 
It exists in the District of Columbia and the different 
Territories of the United States at the pleasure of Con- 
o-ress. The same right, therefore, which allows the citi- 
zens of Virginia to canvass the question of slavery and 
emancipation in that State, and of course to go over and 
lay open the whole ground, may be fairly claimed by 
every citizen of the United States, with respect to the 
same question in the territories subject to the jurisdiction 
of Congress alone. It is, then, not only the right but 
the duty of every citizen to take the subject into con- 
sideration, and, if he think proper, to express his opinion. 
One would think this fact had been forgotten, from the 
tone often taken on this subject, both at the North and 
South. It seems often somewhat studiously to have 
been kept out of sight. When speaking of what New 
England could do towards the abolition of slavery, were 
she disposed, an orator has said, " it (the counsel to 
abolish slavery by legislation) presents to us in New 
England no visible aim, no tangible point, nothing which 
we have the physical power to execute." One would 
imagine that twenty-six thousand slaves, held under the 
laws of Congress, presented a mark large enough for 
Yankee vision, if not for Yankee benevolence. No ! we 
are wrong, and our orators are wrong, to " lay the flat- 
tering unction to our souls," that we have no concern 
in the question of slavery. We have no right to expect 
that any of the slaveholding States should take any steps 
towards the abolition of a system, which is sanctioned 
without hesitation or inquiry, by a body, to which States 
professing to condemn it send a numerous and powerful 
delegation. No farther apology is deemed necessary, 
then, for speaking of slavery, as it is, and, while the 
spirit of justice and candor is preserved, as openly, as 
may seem fitting and useful. It will be seen by the se- 
quel, that it would comport as little with what the writer 
thinks sound policy, as with his inclination and sense 
of duty, to do or say any thing to excite dissatisfaction 
or disobedience amoncr the slaves. 



OF THE UNITED STATES. 5 

Domestic slavery having existed in some parts of the 
United States from the commencement of our national 
existence, the citizens of all parts have become, by long 
familiarity, reconciled to the fact. As with other ac- 
knowledged evils that are thought unavoidable, they have 
learned to look upon the best side of it, so that in spite 
of the constant jealousy of the Southern masters, it is 
true, that the majority of the citizens of the Middle and 
Northern States think very little about the matter. At 
least this was true a year or two ago. It had been so 
often repeated, also, that the onus of slavery pressed 
harder upon the whites than upon the blacks, that their 
sympathies were mostly with the former. Their sup- 
posed interest, too, has led them to view slavery in as 
favorable a light as possible. The same feeling, which 
induced their fathers to accept a constitution, in which 
the perpetuation of slavery, though not provided for, was 
not forbidden ; and the belief that there was no choice, 
but between union and slavery, and disunion and sla- 
very, have lulled the children into acquiescence, and 
almost made it treason to utter a sentence of disappro- 
bation. 

The common representations of the comfortable con- 
dition of the slaves in the Southern States, have done 
much to reconcile the North to the continuance of this 
system. The slaves are well off, it is said ; one finds 
them cheerful and light-hearted. They are, indeed, of a 
fortunate disposition ; fortunate for themselves, for they 
can forget their chains ; fortunate for their masters, for 
they can forgive their injuries. Let not that be set down 
to apathy, which is the result of a gentle and forbearing 
temper. With no thought for the morrow, the apologist 
goes on, food and clothing enough, moderate labor and 
kind treatment, what does the contented negro want ? 
Suppose, that he wants nothing but the hope of advance- 
ment, nothing but the power of intellectual and moral 
improvement. How much is there in this want. It is 
the want of all that will enable him to fulfil the end of 
his being, of all that constitutes his high prerogative of 
manhood. It is not a want to be denied, nor are they to 
be derided who ask for him somethings more than mere 



6 SLAVERY UNDER THE LAWS OF UNITED STATES. 

corporeal happinessj something more than mere vegeta- 
ting existence. 

But are all the scanty and grovelling enjoyments of 
the slave secured to him ; is there no dread of change, 
no fearful thought for the morrow, no sad regret at the 
past ? Let a slave reply. 

** * The colored people are poorly off here,' said one 
who was driving a gentleman and lady from New Eng- 
land through the beautiful country in the vicinity of 
Harper's Ferry. ' They are all slaves. I am a slave 
for life,' and his tone I never shall forget (I quote from 
the lady's note-book before me). 'Well,' said I, 'you 
have a good master who takes care of you, you are better 
off than if you were free.' ^ Missess,' said he, ' Free 
breath is good.' I was very much struck with this, and 

could not answer him, Mr. then asked him if he 

had a wife. ' No, Sir,' said he, bitterly ; 'I got no 
wife nor children. Two years ago I was gone to the 
western country, and an old slave-dealer come along, 
bought my wife and children, and carried them to Ala- 
bama ! My master (they did not belong to the same 
one) offer one hundred and hfty dollars more than he 
gave for her, but he would not take a thousand for her. 
She was an excellent woman, right smart, knew every 
thing bout a house. They carried her into Loudon county 
to hide her. There I found the old slave-dealer. I beg 
him not to carry away my wife : he say he want her for 
wife for himself. Oh death is'nt nothing like it ! Why 
see — if she dead, Providence does it, and you must bear 
it. But to have your companion, your children, torn from 
you, and sold away, a man never can get over it,' and he 
gave a deep groan." 

Such is American slavery, such the American slave- 
trade, the onJi/ lawful slave trade in the world. Can 
any one believe that human creatures who have suf- 
fered like the slave we have heard, or who have a 
continual fear of such misfortune before them, can be 
really happy ? They are not so, it is a delusion to think 
it, and to suppose, that there is not with many of them a 
deep sense of wrong, and an arflcnt longing for freedom. 
To obtain clear notions on the subject, however, we must 
be more minute. 



LAWS OF SLAVERY. ( 

" Slavery," says Montesquieu, " is the establishment 
of a right which gives to one man such a power over 
another, as renders him absolute master of his life and 
fortune." I would rather say, confining the definition 
to domestic slavery, that, It is a state in luMch one man 
is totally deprived of all his natural and inherent rights, 
hy being held as property by another. 

Any one who will reflect upon the above definition will 
perceive, that the only way in which the state denoted in 
its first clause can become a reality, in a community 
claiming, and for the most part possessing, a government 
of laws, must be by the means pointed out in the second. 
The glaring inconsistency of the state of slavery with the 
fundamental principles of society, and of our own govern- 
ment in particular, is, however, only glossed over, when 
by a mere fiction of the law, a certain class of men, the 
slaves, are sunk below the level of humanity, and consti- 
tuted things instead of persons. Let us see what the 
laws say. 

Slavery as established by Laic. " A slave," says the 
civil code of Louisiana, " is one who is in the power of 
a master to whom he belongs. The master may sell him, 
dispose of his person, his industry, his labor ; he can do 
nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire any thing, but what 
must belong to his master." * The law of South Caro- 
lina says, " Slaves shall be deemed to be chattels personal 
in the hands of their owners and possessors, and their 
executors, &c. to all intents, constructions, and purposes 
whatsoever." The civil law which is generally referred 
to in the slaveholding States, as containing the princi- 
ples of the institution, holds slaves, ^' pro nuUis, pro mor- 
tuis,pro quadrupedibus." Thus the very laws of slavery 
begin with contradiction, and virtually acknowledge that 
man cannot be the property of man, by the pains taken 
to declare the slaves to be something else. 

The foregoing accounts of the relation of master and 
slave ought alone to be a sufiicient argument against 
slaveholding. They do not, however, convey an unfair 



* Stroud's Sketch of the Slave Laws, from which most of the 
subsequent account is taken. 

A 3 



y LAWS OF SLAVERY. 

impression of the existing state of slavery in the United 
States. For if we look over the slave laws of the several 
States, to see how far those immutable rights, in the 
enjoyment of which it is the duty and chief aim of so- 
ciety to protect each individual, are secured to the slave, 
we shall find, that while some are entirely set aside, none 
are adequately provided for. These rights are usually 
considered as reducible to three primary articles, viz. 
personal security, personal liberty, and the right of pri- 
vate property.* All rights referable to the two last arti- 
cles are of course out of the question. The right of 
personal security consists in a person's legal and unin- 
terrupted enjoyment of life, limb, body, health, and re- 
putation. Reputation of course a slave has none. It 
can be of no use to him, he need not care for it, and it 
would be idle to talk of its protection. Health is a more 
important affair ; it is of value to his master, whose 
interest it is to preserve it. But this is the slave's only 
security. Should circumstances arise which rendered it 
the master's interest to sacrifice the health of the slave, 
there would be no legal protection for it. While the 
master may determine the kind, degree, and time of 
labor, to which the slave shall be subjected ; can supply 
him with such food and clothing only, both as to quantity 
and quality, as he may think proper, or find convenient ; 
and may, at his discretion, inflict any punishment upon 
his person ; the health of the slave must depend upon the 
accident of the master's character. t 

It is true that in some of the States, the matters just 
enumerated are regulated by laws ; but, besides these 
being altogether insufficient as to the amount of protec- 
tion afforded, they are rendered almost wholly nugatory, 
by the withholding of that, on which depends the efficacy 
of all laws, namely, the right of testimony. " It is an 



* Blackstone's Commentaries. 

t Thomas Clay, Esq. of Georgia, in a paper upon the Moral Imr 
provement of Negroes on Plantations, published in 1833, speaks of 
the customary allowance of food from the masters, as not being in 
all cases sufficient. I cannot quote his words, his paper not being 
by me at this moment. 



LAWS OF SLAVERY. ' 9 

inflexible and universal rule of slave law, tiiat the testi- 
mony of a colored person, whether bond or free, shall not 
be received against a white." The openings for abuse, 
that this rule affords, are too obvious to need mention. 
That abuses of the grossest nature do not unfrequently 
occur, is proved by too many undoubted histories, to 
admit of denial or question. It would be painful and 
disgusting to detail any of the evidence on this point. 

How far the slave is protected in the enjoyment of his 
body and limbs, may be inferred from what has been 
already stated, as well as from what will be said about 
the security of his life. The wilful murder of a slave by 
a white is now a crime punishable by death in every 
State. But, beside the frequent difficulty of conviction, 
which must arise from the exclusion of the evidence of 
colored persons, the law contemplates several modes in 
which the life of a slave may be taken away, without the 
risk of any harsher sentence, than that of " justifiable 
homicide." A slave may die under " moderate punish- 
ment,^' and no penalty await the inflicter of it. A slave 
outlawed, which he may be, for a very trivial offence ; or 
one resisting, or offering to resist his master by force, 
may be lawfully killed. Enough has been said to show- 
that the life, limbs, and body of the slave are insuffi- 
ciently protected. The enjoyment of these are the only 
personal rights, which there is any pretence of securing 
to him. If we add, that the slave may be disposed of at 
his master's pleasure, or by the operation of law, as any 
other property ; that slavery is hereditary and perpetual ; 
and that in all States the greatest obstacles are placed 
in the way of manumission, we shall have finished the 
sketch of slavery, as far as the relation of master and 
slave is concerned. 

A being, thus deprived of his absolute and inherent 
rights, cannot be expected to possess any of those social 
rights which result from the relations of man to man in 
society. Accordingly he has none. But he has social 
duties, for these spring from the rights of other persons. 
Debased as the slave is, and degraded in the eye of the 
law, and of his fellow man, it is impossible not to regard 
him as an accountable creature. He can commit crime, 
a4 



10 PEI'IAL LAWS OF SLAVERY. 

and must be restrained therefrom, by the terror of punish- 
ment. The penal law, therefore, recognises his exist- 
ence. Though he does not share in the benefits of its 
protection, he is liable to its penalties. A penal code for 
freemen and for slaves must necessarily differ. There is 
accordingly great difference, in the nature of the con- 
stituted offences, in the degree of punishment for similar 
offences, and in the nature of some of the punishments. 
Many acts, which in a freeman could scarcely be called 
crimes, are punished with considerable severity in a 
slave. Stroud says, there are seventy-one crimes in the 
slaveholding States for which slaves suffer death, for 
which the white man suffers nothing worse than impris- 
onment in the penitentiary. Cropping and the pillory, 
whipping and death, are the principal, it may almost be 
said, the only punishments for all crimes in the slave. 
There is, however, one penalty, sometimes suffered by 
free blacks in the slaveholding States, that ought to be 
mentioned here. It consists in being sold to slavery for 
life, or for a term of years, and is awarded for different 
offences in different States. This penalty is sometimes 
used as a mode of obtaining satisfaction for debt, or in 
case a free colored person is unable to pay a fine imposed 
upon him by law. It is not confined to these cases, 
however. By the laws of several of the slaveholding 
States, manumitted and other free persons of color, 
however respectable their characters, may be arrested in 
the prosecution of their lav^ful business, and, if docu- 
mentary evidence of their right to freedom cannot be 
immediately produced by them, they may be thrown into 
prison, and advertised as runaway slaves. Should no 
owner, as must always be the case, unless injustice is 
done, appear within a limited time, the jailer is directed 
to dispose of them at public auction, as unclaimed fugi- 
tive slaves, in order to derive from the proceeds of the 
sale, the means of defraying their expenses while in 
prison. This procedure occurs upon the principle com- 
mon at the South, that every colored person is to be 
presumed to be a slave, unless he can prove his freedom.* 



'" This doctrine lias been proinulgated from the bench. 



PENAL LAWS OF SLAVERY. 11 

It is but a short time since that there was an adver- 
tisement in the Washington papers, signed by the jailer 
and marshal of the district, giving notice, that on a 
certain day, would be sold at auction, a man nearly 
white, who called himself free. This sale was ap- 
pointed for payment of the jail fees, under an old law 
of Maryland, authorizing such procedure. The law has 
been repealed in Maryland, but is still in force in that part 
of the District of Columbia, which was ceded by that State 
to the general government. Here, then, is one of the most 
flagrant violations of the laws of nature, and the laws of 
a great part of the land, occurring at the very seat of 
government of " the freest nation upon earth." Does 
this present " no visible aim, no tangible point to New 
England? " Pennsylvania has begun her duty by urging 
upon Congress the abolition of slavery in the District of 
Columbia. Let the other free States look to theirs. 

The exclusion of the evidence of all colored persons, 
in trials where whites are the defendants, must of course, 
in almost every case, prevent justice being rendered to 
the slave, nor can he in any case institute an action 
against his master or any white man. There is, how- 
ever, a single exception to this rule of exclusion. A 
colored man claiming to be free, may be heard in his 
own defence. But he can call in the aid of no other 
colored testimony in his behalf At the same time the 
evidence of one slave is admitted in all trials, even 
capital ones, against another, or even against a free 
black. Nor is the slave in such cases always Jflit upon 
oath. 

The benefit of petit jury is allowed the slave in trials 
for his life in most of the States. In some the case must 
come first before the grand jury. In three States the 
slave has not the benefit of jury in any case whatsoever, 
but is tried before a court of justices and freeholders, 
who are " to hear and determine the matter in the most 
summary and expeditious manner possible." 

There remains but one circumstance farther to be 
mentioned, in the account of the legal condition of the 
slave. It is, that " the whole force of the laws is exerted 
to keep him in ignorance." He is deprived of the means 



12 EDUCATION OT SLAVES. 

of education, and of moral and religious instruction. 
The same is true in most of the slave States, of free 
negroes also. For, " Whereas," says the act of North 
Carolina, " teaching slaves to read and write has a 
tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to 
produce insurrection and rebellion," therefore in that 
State and others, heavy penalties await those evil-dis- 
posed persons, who may endeavour to let a little light 
into the dark places of the negro's soul. On this point 
the laws are very strict and constantly increasing in 
severity. Scarce a year passes without some new enact- 
ment. Even the precepts of the peaceful religion of 
Jesus are thought dangerous. It would seem as if their 
whole character was changed when they are presented 
to the mind of the black. The influence which soothes 
and softens others, and teaches them whatever station 
they are in, therewith to be content, makes him a de- 
signing and malignant fiend. 

The efficacy of all these prohibitions is probably as 
great as can be desired. If it were possible to destroy 
the germinating power of the human intellect without 
destroying the brain in which it resides, it would be in a 
fair way of being done. If any race of men could be so 
far degraded as to utterly lose the caste of humanity, 
we might expect this to happen to the negro slaves of 
North America. 

We have spoken of slavery as established by law. 
Some of its provisions may seem unnecessarily stern. 
The mfikers of the laws, however, have done no more 
than follow out the fundamental principles of the insti- 
tutions which declare the slave a chattel to be bought and 
sold. I cannot in this connexion forget the words of 
Bryan Edwards, a defender of slavery and of the slave 
trade. Speaking of the Code Noir of Louis XIV. a' code 
remarkable for its humanity, he says, '' In countries 
where slavery is established, the leading principle, on 
which government is supported, is fear, or a sense of 
that absolute coercive necessity, which, leaving no choice 
of action, supersedes all question ofrisht. Every endea- 
vour, therefore, to extend positive rights to men in this 
state, is an attempt to reconcile inherent contradictions, 



EFFECTS OF SLAVERY. 13 

and to W-end principles together which admit not of 
combination." 

Effect:^ of Slavery. I shall now sliglitly spcnk of some 
of the effects of slavery, which, thougli apparently indi- 
rect, are necessary. 

We have seen how carefully all mental imj)ro4ement 
was guarded against in the slave ; and also how slight 
was the protection of Ins person. His morals are not 
better cared for. Honesty is, to be sure, cherished, or 
may be presumed to be ; although where temptation is 
all around, and the sanctions of any virtue are so slight, 
this -one cannot be secure. Another, quite as important 
to the character, though not to the master's interest, has 
less protection ; that is chastity. It is perhaps idle to 
speak of what there is so little pretence of regarding. 
The domestic relations of the slave have no protection 
whatever in the law, and in practice, it is nearly the 
same thing. The ceremony of marriage is sometimes 
performed by a clergyman or a justice, but quite as 
often there is no farther preliminary to male and female 
living together, than simply taking each other's word, 
which is not thought very binding, for they divorce and 
marry again at pleasure. What a mockery indeed would 
be the marriage rites, with the solemn declaration, 
" What God has joined together, let not man put asun- 
der," to those whom, at the next moment, the ruthless 
hammer of the auctioneer, and the calculating bid of tlie 
cold-hearted slave-dealer, may separate for ever. But 
this is not all, and painful and disgusting as the truth is, 
it must be told, if we would know the realities of slavery. 
" Marriage among them (the slaves) is commonly al- 
lowed- but where a young man has a fine fiimily, the 
planter very often, with a view to the increase of his 
stock, forces him to have many wives."* Substitute for 
the word " forces" in the sentence just quoted, the words 
" allows and encourages," and then ask any slave-holder 
if it does not tell the truth. It cannot be denied. And 
how is it palliated ? 

* Stuart's Travels, Vol. II. p. 120. Tiic witness is impartial; his 
statements cannot be denied, but (bey bave surprised and shocked 
many a reader. 



14 DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE. 

What harm is done ? it may be asked. The negro is 
ignorant and debased ; such customs can scarcely cor- 
rupt him ; why judge him by the standard of more 
refined society? To these questions I would simply 
reply by a few others. Is marriage a good institution or 
not ? If it is good for the refined and the rich, is it not 
equally so for the ignorant and the poor ? Is virtue, and 
are the safeguards of virtue, less necessary for any one 
class of men than another. The untutored negro slave 
may be pardoned for his licentiousness. But whether 
the plea of his ignorance will avail those who permit or 
promote it, who do not labor incessantly to restrain it, 
is left to their own consciences. I would gladly, if I 
could, drav*' a veil of thick darkness over the pollution of 
slavery, but it cannot be hidden. Shall no effort, then, 
be made to wipe it away ? 

Domestic Slave Trade. Another of the necessary evils 
of slavery is the extensive and systematic traffic in men, 
to which it gives rise. Of course while slavery lasts, 
slaves must be bought and sold, and any attempt to pre- 
vent it would be a" blow at slavery itself, and in a most 
vital part too. The trade is, therefore, rather an essen- 
tial part of the system of slavery, than an effect of it. 
Still, as it is not recognised as such, I believe, by the 
laws, and as it deserves special consideration, this seems 
the most proper place to introduce it. 

The importation of slaves from Africa, or any foreign 
coast, into the United States, was made illegal in 1808, 
the Federal Constitution containing an express stipula- 
tion that this should not be done before. From that 
time, of course, the country was to raise its own slaves. 
The act prohibiting importation, though not intended 
for a protecting tariff", virtually became such, and at the 
present day it happens that slave-breeding is the only 
kind of home-production, with which foreign competition 
is entirely prohibited. It is well. It is some gain at 
least, that the united voice of the civilized world has 
pronounced the African slave trade, " inconsistent with 
justice, humanity, and religion." The day may come, 
when the same stigma shall be cast upon the American 
slave trade. But this, it is said, is a very different thing. 



DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE. 15 

Is it SO indeed ? and how different ? As light from dark- 
ness, as purity from sin ? I fear not ; and yet good men, 
men of reputation, men of very high name, sanction it, 
and strange hmguage has been used sometimes. " It is, 
after all," says one of note, " an extraordinary circum- 
stance, that, whilst emigration to this country, of parents 
Avho have voluntarily separated themselves from their 
children, and of children who have left behind them 
their parents, never to revisit their native shores, passes 
daily before our eyes, without observation, so much sensi- 
bility should be felt when similar occurrences take place 
in relation to this class of people." And of whom is this 
person speaking? Of men, women, and children, sold 
in the District of Columbia or Virginia, to be driven to 
New Orleans, there, for the miserable remnant of their 
days, to till the ground and eat the bread of the stranger. 
And this is emigration ! Ask the meanest Irish laborer, 
who heaves the weary spade, upon our railroads or canals, 
what brought him from his native land. He will tell 
you, — hope. And did he want to come ? oh no ! It 
was tearing the very fibres of his heart to leave the loved 
home of his childhood, and seek across a wilderness of 
waters a livelihood, the reward of steady industry, his 
lot denied him there. He is glad, now, for success is 
before him, he is in freedom and plenty. But what has 
the slave to do with all these ? Hope — it is not for 
him ; freedom — it is not his birthright ; success — he 
knows not what it means. Call not, then, the transporta- 
tion of slaves, emigration ! Else why may they not thus 
emigrate from Africa ? What a precious argument would 
that idea have given to the enemies of Wilberforce ! 
African emigration ! It did not occur to them. 

Some estimate of the extent and importance of this 
domestic trade may be formed from the fact, that not less 
than six thousand slaves are annually sent out of Virginia 
to the Southern and Western markets ; Maryland keeps 
her slave population equal ; and the District of Columbia, 
forming a depot for the neighbourhood, exports about one 
thousand annually ; not of its own growth of course, 
but it is an exceedingly convenient place for large 
dealers, and very extensive establishments are situated 



16 SLAVE TRADE. 

there.* There are in the District more than one private 
gaol for the storing of the wretches who may be on hand 
for sale, and those traders who have not capital enough 
to own or rent houses for themselves, find ample accom- 
modation in the garrets and cellars of hotels and private 
dwellings, or what is still better, in the public prisons 
belonging to the United States. t 

Mr. Miner, member of Congress for Pennsylvania, 
brought the sul)ject of slavery and the slave trade, in the 
District of Columbia, before the House of Representa- 
tives in 1829. In his speech on the occasion he made 
the following statement. 

" By papers furnished me by the keeper, it appears 
that there were sent to prison for safe keeping, that is, 
as is well understood, for sale ; 

In 1824 81 Slaves 

1825 124 

1826 and 1827 ... 156 
*1828 91 = 452. 

So that it would appear that in the last five years, more 
than four hundred and fifty persons had been confined in 
the public prison of the city, — a prison under the con- 
trol of Congress, and regulated by its laws, — for sale in 
the process of the slave trade." Mr. Miner justly adds that 
such was not the purpose for which the prison was built.t 
It is thus upon soil, which should be peculiarly sacred 
to freedom, that the practices which give to slavery its 
vilest features, are most frequent and open. It is there, 

* It is not worth while to affect reserve or dehcacy on this topic. 
The slave-raising of Virginia is acknowledged by her own writers. 
And any one who is curious or incredulous may be referred to two 
articles in the American Quarterly Review, Nos. 23, and 24, upon 
the Slavery Question in Virginia. Both articles bear internal proof 
of being written by citizens of that State. One of the writers says, 
" It may be that there is a small section of Virginia (perhaps we 
could indicate it) where the theory of population is studied with 
reference to the yearly income from the sale of slaves." Well may 
he exclaim, " ' And will the aspiring blood of Lancaster ' endure 
it to be said that a Guinea is still to be found in America, and that 
Guinea is Virginia ? " American Quarterly Review, No. 24, p. 391. 

t Dr. Torrey's Portraiture of Slavery, published fifteen years 
ago. American Quarterly Review, Sept. 1833. 



SLAVE TRADE. 17 

that without *' the prostitution of a royal negative," a 
" market is kept open where men are bouglit and sokl." * 
There is the great haunt of all concerned in this infernal 
tralhc, which is carried on under the very eyes of Con- 
gress, whose power to extirpate it totally and imme- 
diately, root and branch, is unquestioned and unques- 
tionable. 

How long must " the sound of the hammer" be heard, 
how long must " the smoke of the furnace be visible, 
where chains and fetters are forged for human limbs?" 
How long shall be seen the visages of those, who not 
" by stealth and at midnight," but in the broad glare 
of day, " labor at this work of hell." How long before 
a voice shall be heard, under the domes of our capitol, 
saying, " Let this spot be purified, or let it cease to be of 
America. Let it be purified, or let it be set aside from the 
Christian w^orld ; let it be put out of the circle of human 
sympathies and human regards ; and let civilized man 
henceforth have no communion with it." t 

Let it not be forgotten, moreover, that the same clause 
in the constitution which empowered Congress, in 1807, 
to pass an act proliibiting the foreign slave trade after 
the year 1808, gives it the authority, whenever it shall 
see fit, to prohibit the domestic slave trade. J Let it be 
understood also, as susceptible of the clearest proof, that 
there is not one crime that can be laid at the door of the 



* First Draft of the Declaration of Independence. 

t Webster's Plymouth Oration. Allusion to the African Slave 
Trade. 

X " Commerce in slaves, since the year 1808, being as much 
subject to Congress as any other commerce, if it should see fit to 
exact that no slave should ever be sold from one State to another, it 
is not perceived how its constitutional right to make such provision 
could be questioned." Such was the language of a memorial, 
drawn up in 1819, by a committee of the inhabitants of Boston and 
the vicinity, of which committee the Honorable Daniel Webster 
was chairman. The memorial was addressed to Congress, and its 
subject was the Prohibition of Slavery in the New States ; referring 
to Missouri. And now another territory is knocking at our doors, 
and asking to be admitted to the rank of an independent State and 
member of the Union. She too v.-ill claim the glorious privilege of 
a slave representation. And who shall oppose her .' None. The 
spirit of eighteen hundred and nineteen is broken and gone. 



18 SLAVE TRADE. 

" accursed (African) slave trade," which is not also 
chargeable upon our own. It severs all earthly ties ; it 
carries old and young, male and female, in chains and 
with stripes, into distant, hopeless bondage, and consigns 
them to a strange taskmaster ; it makes slaves of free- 
men, by kidnapping, and otherwise ; it causes the pro- 
lific energies of the African mother to be stimulated to 
the utmost, that as many wretches as may, shall be born 
into this hapless state, and go to swell the multitude, 
whose condition even now presses upon the nation, a 
burthen and a curse.* It is at once the daughter and 
the nurse of slavery, which ere this perhaps, in some of 
the States, would have proved too decayed and worthless 
a system to be sustained, but for the fresh life-blood in- 
fused into its veins, by the disgusting filial piety of its 
offspring. " For it is believed," says the Honorable 
Henry Clay, *' that no where in the farming portion of 
the United States would slave labor be generally em- 
ployed, if the proprietor were not tempted to raise slaves, 
by the high price of the Southern market which keeps 
it up in his own."t 

Thus the continuance of slavery in more than one of 
the States, is fairly attributable to the Domestic Slave 
Trade. This cannot continue always. 

Effect of Slavery on the Free. The effects of slavery 
upon the free blacks in the Southern States are almost 
as bad, as upon the slaves themselves. We have seen 
that many of the most restrictive regulations of slavery 
applied to the free persons of color as well as to the 
slaves. They are, in all the slaveholding States, de- 
prived of the right of testimony, in almost all, of that of 
suffrage ; and also of the means of mental and religious 
instruction. These and numerous other disabilities ren- 
der their state virtually one of civil slavery, as rigorous 
and hopeless as that of the subjects of the Grand Seignior. 
Indeed, it is idle to talk about free persons of color. 

* See Torrey's Portraiture of Slavery. American Quarterly 
Review, Nos. 23 and 24. 

i " Shut up all outlet into the Southern and South-western States, 
and the price of slaves in Virginia would sink down to a cipher."' 
American Quarterly Review, No. 24, p. 392. 



EFFECT OF SLAVERY ON THE FREE. 19 

There are none such in the Southern States.* They 
who are called so, are free only from the whip and com- 
pulsory labor. Forbidden by written law from presuming 
to equal themselves with the whites, debased by former 
slavery, and bound down by all the force of public 
opinion and private prejudice; degraded systematically, 
and then distrusted, despised, and hated for the vices 
inseparable from their condition, it is mockery to call 
them free. Of the condition of this class of people in 
the United States and its causes, more will be said here- 
after. But let it not be called " not casualty but fate," 
and the necessary result of that emancipation which 
others, than " hair-brained fanatics," are asking for them. 
Of the influence of slavery upon the character of the 
masters, it is not my purpose to say much. Mr. Jeffer- 
son's testimony upon this subject is in accordance with 
what we should expect from the general principles of hu- 
man nature and human action. His language is so well 
known, that it need not be repeated. A system full of 
essential injustice, and of actual pollution, as this has 
been shown to be, can never be a source of good to any 
within the sphere of its influence. My present object, 
however, being rather to speak of the moral evils of 
slavery as seen in the ill-starred race, who are its peculiar 
victims, and of the hopes that may offer of their release, 
I shall pass by this part of the subject, with a few re- 
marks only, upon a sentiment which, it has been said, 
was peculiarly cherished by slaveholding. This is the love 
of liberty. It would seem somewhat paradoxical, at first, 
to hear of " the plant of liberty flourishing best in the rank 
soil of slavery," if indeed any meaning could be attached 
to the words at all. But something like this is not a 
rare opinion among slaveholders themselves, and it is 
worth a little attention. It would be stating the case 
more fairly perhaps to say, that liberty has been thought to 
find her warmest advocates in those freemen who were 
masters of slaves. And the high authority of Mr. Burke 



* The same remark will apply to some of the non-slavehokling 
States. Ohio forbids their evidence from being taken in the courts, 
and Connecticut has quite distinguished herself in relation to them. 



20 EFFECT OF SLAVERY ON THE FREE. 

has been often quoted as sanctioning this doctrine. His 
own fair and pure mind, however, would have been 
shocked at the use made of his expressions. Speaking 
of the stubborn resistance the colonies would make to 
all encroachments on the part of the mother country, 
and of the circumstances which would cherish the spirit 
of opposition, he says, — *' In Virginia and the Carolinas 
they have a multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, 
in any part of the world, those who are free are by far 
the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom 
is to them not merely an enjoyment, but a kind of 
rank and privilege, and looks amongst them like some- 
thing more liberal and noble. I do not mean, Sir, 
to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, 
which has at least as much pride as virtue in it ; but 
I cannot alter the nature of man. — Such were all the 
ancient commonwealths, and such will be all masters of 
slaves who are not slaves themselves. In such a people 
the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit 
of freedom, and renders it invincible." 

Now it is not strange at all, that the greater ** the 
rank and privilege " of liberty, the greater should be its 
value in the eyes of its possessors, and the more stub- 
born its defence. Those who have most to lose, are 
naturally most jealous of encroachment, and not the less 
so probably, when they perchance possess something 
beyond their share. Perhaps the last man in the world 
to part with his " rank and privilege " of liberty, would 
be the Autocrat of all the Russias, but he has never yet 
claimed, the title o^ friend of freedom. This sentiment, 
of which slaveholders have sometimes boasted, is not 
then the pure spirit of liberty. There is something else 
engrafted upon it, which, if it adds to its strength, certain- 
ly does not to its beauty. It may be doubted if it does 
either ; and howsoever just might have been the remark 
of Mr. Burke, at the time when it was made, the history 
of our own revolution, and of more than one people 
since then, has shown that it is no longer true. 

There is no lack in the world of a willingness to level 
down, but the truly liberal spirit is willing to level up, or 
at least to remove all artificial obstacles to elevation. Does 



FREE AND SLAVE LABOR. 21 

such a spirit exist in a slaveholding community ? And 
yet it is said, that slavery is not unfavorable to tiie spirit 
of equality. " Where all menial offices," it is said, " are 
performed by a distinct class, all who belong to the other 
meet upon an equal footing ; and nowhere is there such 
open frankness among white men, as in our Southern 
States ; for the color marks exemption from labor, and 
of course the rank of gentleman."* Admitting this, to 
what does it amount ? Simply to this, that one half or 
quarter of the community are made a sort of vicarious 
sacrifice for the rest, upon the altar of social freedom. 
That some may enjoy entire liberty, others must enjoy 
none. This cannot be called republicanism. 

Free and Slave Labor, Respecting the influence of 
slavery on national prosperity it is safe to say there 
is not at present much dispute. Without placing im- 
plicit confidence in the declarations often made for the 
planters of the cotton and sugar growing States, and 
sometimes by them, that they would gladly be rid of the 
system, if they could with safety, it is believed that a 
large portion of the reflecting and well informed men, 
throughout the Union, view it as both a moral and an 
economical evil. How any person can doubt that it is 
such, who can give even a bird's-eye glance around the 
world, and compare the respective condition of those coun- 
tries where it prevails, and of those where it does not, is 
a marvel. Compare Kentucky with Ohio, Western with 
Eastern Virginia ; mark the immense depreciation of 
plantation property in the West Indies, where, even in 
Cuba, the most fertile and the most abundantly supplied 
with negroes of all the islands, so many estates, with 
their hundreds of acres and of slaves, are insolvent, and 
ask if slavery can be gainful. It is not so, it never has 
been so. Slave labor, unless conducted with the most 
remorseless cruelty, has never been cheaper, than free. 
Nothing more has been proved with relation to it, than 
that it was better than no labor at all. It was intro- 
duced into America, when laborers could only be pro- 
cured by compulsion ; and because, at that period, and 

* American Quarterly Review, No. 23, Art. Slavery. 



22 SLAVERY MORALLY WRONG. 

for a long time afterward, in new and rich countries with 
peculiar products, and never competing with free labor, 
it reared immense fortunes, it obtained an estimation to 
which it had no rightful claim. Now, the superiority of 
free labor over slave is only doubted in the production of 
a few articles of tropical growth. These are sugar, rice, 
and cotton. To the subject of their cultivation by free 
labor I shall recur hereafter. With regard to all others, 
the question of " wages or the whip" may be regarded 
as settled. And we may hope the time is not very far 
distant, when it will be acknowledged, without limita- 
tion, that, economically considered, slavery is half a cen- 
tury too late in the world ; that it is a rude and cumbrous 
species of machinery, a relic of past ages, whose very 
existence betokens decrepitude or premature infirmity. 
Wherever it remains, no labor-saving power can ever be 
introduced ; it is death to all improvement, and must 
necessarily cause degeneration. It is an incubus upon 
the fortunes of the master, cramping all his energies, 
and rendering abortive all his schemes for physical or 
moral improvement. Its long duration, its protracted 
fall, will be the v;onder of another age. 

Slavery Morally Wrong. To say that slaveholding is 
morally wrong, and yet that it ought not at once to cease, 
is one of those inconsistencies into which men often fall, 
by allowing themselves to be governed by rules of short- 
sighted expediency in questions admitting but one solu- 
tion, and which have been already decided by the moral 
sentiment, the consenting reason of the Christian world, 
and by the law of God. 

To assume *' that no human being has an abstract 
right to hold another in a state of perpetual bondage," 
and yet to admit, " nay to maintain, the innocence of 
slaveholding, under present circumstances," * any where, 
is to say that a man may do innocently, that which he 
has no right to do, or else that " an abstract right " is 
not " a right.'' Or I would ask by what kind of right 
men may do innocently that which abstract right for- 
bids ? The answer of course will be, the right of ex- 

* American Quarterly Review, No. 24, p. 403. 



SLAVERY MORALLY WRONG. 



23 



jpediency. But abstract right, if it mean any thing, is 
moral right, right in itself and in the sight of God. It 
is not merely the highest, but it is the only right, for 
there can be but one ; and that which men call expe- 
diency, is nothing more than the best choice which 
human understanding, .unassisted and alone, is able to 
make, in cases where that which is right in itself, 
or abstract right, is not surely discernible. We may 
infer that a thing is right from its seeming expedient, 
but expediency is only really good, as it approximates to 
moral right, and where this is known, to choose any 
thing else is to prefer doubt to certainty, darkness to 
light. To discuss a subject on the narrow ground of 
expediency, which has already been decided upon the 
broad and final one of morality and religion, is something 
worse than arguing in a circle, it is appealing to earth 
from the arbitration of heaven. That which is morally 
wrong can never be expedient. The only way for one 
to get out of the dilemma, who thinks that slavery ought 
to continue not ahvays, but yet a little longer, is at once 
to deny that the decision of the moral sentiment has been 
given in the case, and refer it wholly to expediency. 
He must not say that slaveholding is morally wrong, nor 
that slavery is unjust, even in the abstract, but simply, 
that the one is right or wrong, the other just or unjust, 
accordincr to circumstances.* 



* This is the ground taken by the very able writer who defends 
"slavery in the 23d No. of the American Quarterly Review. The 
article is the most powerful I have ever seen upon the same side 
of the question, superior perhaps to any that have appeared in the 
London Qiiarterly. Its conservative spirit would have done honor 
to the English journal or to Blackwood. There is indeed some- 
thins; bej-ond conservativeness in it, something of the spirit which, 
in 1793, in the British House of Lords, " deprecated the new phi- 
losophy. It was as full of mischief as Pandora's box. The doctrine 
of the abolition of the slave trade was a species of it." Vid. 
Sel. Juurn. of For. Per. Lit. No. 7, Crit. jVotices, p. 49. The 
American Quarterly Reviewer evidently considers the doctrine 
of the abolition of slavery as another species of the new and mis- 
chievous philosophy. He calls the slaves "the happiest of the 
human race ; " and says, " that in the contact between civili/ed 
and uncivilized man, all history and experience show, that the 
former will be sure to sink to the level of the latter." A singular 
idea, by the way, considering that civilization has spread, and the 

n9 



24 SLAVERY MORALLY WRONG. 

The only question to be decided in the case, then, is, 
whether man has or has not an inherent right of liberty, 
or slavery is or is not morally wrong ? If slavery is 
wcong, that it ought to be abandoned, and imme- 
diately too, is the unavoidable conclusion, since we 
are not to do wrong that good may come of it. It 
may appear to some idle and useless to attempt, at 
the present day and in this land, to prove the affirm- 
ative of the above question. It is not, however, al- 
ways granted, even speciously, and never really, by 
those who would justify the continuance of slavery. 
To all such, then, as maintain that man can hold prop- 
erty in man, I put the question, — Do you consider the 
right of property as an inherent one, or as the creature 
of civil society 1 If the former, I ask in and to what 
has man an inherent right of property, if not in his 
own labor, and to the use and enjoyment of his own 
productive powers 1 To what else than this very right, 
can the right to any property whatever more certainly be 
traced? To nothing else in the world. The right of 
private property, if there be such a thing, resolves itself 
at once into a right to the use and enjoyment of one's 
own faculties. He who deprives a man of this use and 
enjoyment, therefore, violates the very principle which is 
the basis of the right of property, and is guilty of rob- 
bery, just as much as when he violates the right of 
property in any other of its forms or stages. And it 
matters not the least, whether this violation commence 
at birth, in infancy, or in adult years, the principle is 
still the same. He, then, who maintains the right of 
holding property in man, must give up the doctrine, that 
the right of property is inherent, and take the other, that 
it is the creature of civil society. But the slaveholder 
will beware of this, for that which society gave, it 
may at its good pleasure take away. 

The choice of ground, however, is not granted to the 



only obvious direction is toward and among the uncivilized. He 
thinks nothing but slavery can " prevent the facilis descensus " of 
the whites in Virginia to a level with the blacks. Facilis, in- 
deed, if slavery prevents it. Vid. American Quarterly Review, 
No. 24, p. 242. 



SLAVERY MORALLY WRONG. 25 

slaveholder. That the right of property is an absolute 
and inherent one, is not only a necessary postulate in 
all law, but in itself incontrovertible. But not for the 
above reason only is slavery said to be mojrally wrorfg. 
There is a higher and stronger one. It is, that whereas 
man may hold brute animals as his property, their being 
no discoverable object in their creation the perfect at- 
tainment of which is not compatible with their being so 
held, the whole aim and end for which man was brought 
into the world is and must be necessarily defeated by 
his being subjected in all things to the will of another. 
Self-improvement, growth in knowledge and in virtue, 
the approximation of the soul to the likeness of the 
All-wise and Good, are the objects of man's being ; and 
are not these entirely defeated by his being subjected to 
absolute control in every act ; so shut in and hampered, 
if it is chosen, in the exercise of his faculties, that his 
mind is to him a useless instrument, and his heart and 
affections are deprived of all healthful and kindly in- 
fluences, while he is exposed perchance, if not of ne- 
cessity, to overpowering temptations ? Is not slavery 
precisely such a state as this 1 Do not its principles 
make it so, and its laws and its well-known realities 
prove it not otherwise ? I appeal to the picture I have 
given, feeble though it is ; I appeal to slaveholders 
themselves, to any and all of them. It is not sufficient, 
if some among them say, (and that there are good men 
and conscientious men among them I know,) that they 
try to remedy the evil, and think that they have succeed- 
ed ; I speak of the system, with the chance of those 
who shall be its ministers, in the ordinary and necessary 
course of human nature ; and I would ask them also if 
there is not a bound, and that not a very wide one, 
which, with all their efforts, they cannot go beyond ? 
Can a slave make exertions of himself, can he do any 
thing to form his own character ; can he shun that which 
is evil, or seek that which is good, but at the capricious 
pleasure of another ; can he ever be else than a very 
dependent being, totally dependent on one far below 
him, whom alone, he, as well as his owner, has been 
directed to call Master ? 
b3 



26 SLAVERY MORALLY WRONG. 

Man's liberty, then, is indeed inalienable, if we would 
seek accordance with nature's laws. And if the moral 
sentiment and the revealed word of God have decided 
that slavery is practically wrong, we may know there- 
by that there is a remedy ; and that its extinction 
cannot do more evil than its continuance, for no man 
is placed in a situation where he is compelled to be 
unjust. When the advocate of immediate emancipa- 
tion, therefore, urges it as a duty, and declares his re- 
liance on Heaven for the consequences, he means not 
to talk of results without means, but simply to express 
his conviction, that a way may be found to do justice 
with safety. He does not say, the consequences of such 
a course may be awful, but will be only the just reward 
of wrong doing, but that worse consequences can never 
ensue from beginning to do right, than continuing to do 
wrong. Who shall foretell all the evils the continuance 
of slavery will engender ? Who beside Omniscience 
shall say what would be all the consequences of eman- 
cipation ? If the understanding, then, and experience 
are at fault, we must refer to that higher principle, 
whose decisions outstrip the deductions of logic, yet 
never run counter ; whose counsels never err, while he 
who runs may read them. 

" There is a law," says Lord Brougham, " above the 
enactment of all human codes — the same throughout 
the world — the same in all time — it is the law written 
by the finger of God upon the heart of man ; and by that 
law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud 
and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they will reject with 
indignation the wild and guilty fantasy, that man can 
hold property in man." Has not America, has not New 
England something to learn ? * 

* " There is nothing new under the sun." The principle of the 
abolitionists at the present day, is precisely that adopted by the 
Friends, seventy years ago, and the latter carried it farther at that 
time than many of the former do novv, for they refused Christian 
fellowship to those who held slaves. — The conscientious planter, 
will say in answer to all this, that my premises are assumed ; that 
to be sure the law regards slaves as chattels, and himself as their 
owner, but that he regards them as men, and treats them as such ; 
that he conceives himself in the order of Providence as their ap- 



IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 27 

Immediate Emancipation. The duty of immediate 
emancipation is an inference from the principle that 
slaveholding is morally wrong, so plain and unavoidable, 
that had it not been denied, what has already been said 
about it would have been superfluous. As it is, it may 
be worth while to attend to a few more points in relation 
to the subject, and view the whole in another light. To 
be a slave, we have seen, is to be held by another man 
as property, regarded by the law, and, perchance at 
least, by the owner, as a being possessed of no natural 
right, but that of life, — a chattel. To be emancipated 
is to cease to be held as property, to have all the natural 
rights thenceforth protected by law, as are those of any 
other human being, to cease to be a chattel, and to be- 
come ^person or a man. It is obvious, that, with regard 
to an individual, whenever emancipation takes place at 

pointed guardian, and that he feels no more at liberty to give up 
this guardianship, than a parent to give up his control over his 
children. In answer to this it is to be said, that every planter 
does regard his slaves as property, an idea in itself false and con- 
tradictory, since man cannot in the nature of things be the property 
of man, and so long as he holds to this, he cannot properly respect 
the image of God in his slave ; that the latter is essentially deprived 
of the first motive to self-improvement, in rude or refined minds, 
namely, the near prospect of advancement ; that let the master do 
what he may himself, he cannot make others do the same, the 
slave is -necessarily subject to the caprice and tyranny of any un- 
principled white who may by chance cross his path ; and, lastly, 
supposing that the conscientious slaveholder does treat his slaves 
as though they were free, (for, after all, nothing short of this will 
serve his plea, and if this be actually true, there appears no good 
reason why their freedom should not be declared,) what security 
have the slaves for the continuance of their good fortune ? The 
death of the master, or a turn of the wheel of fortune, subjects 
them to a change, to the hazard of an auction, or an almost equal 
hazard in the character of heirs at law. With the average of 
human character it is utterly out of the question, unless that 
average is far higher in the slaveholding States than any where 
else in the world, that the mass of the slaves should be under 
any thing that deserves the name of guardianship, under any 
thing better than absolute irresponsible power, which is exercised 
with no higher restraining motive than interest. Denmark is an 
absolute monarchy, but its citizens are governed only by laws, 
and are practically free. An American prefers a constitution. 
Why ? To be assured of his freedom. Few of the slaves are well 
off, and none are assured of being so. 
b4 



28 IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 

all, it must be immediate, — instantaneous. He must 
be at one moment an item of property, and the next a 
being capable of holding property himself There can 
of course be no middle state ; he must be one or the 
other, a slave or a freeman.* To speak of the gradual 
emancipation of an individual would be absurd. It is 
only in relation to a number that the term has any mean- 

But if it is a duty immediately to emancipate one 
slave, because slaveholding in itself is wrong, no less is 
it a duty so to emancipate every other. To speak of 
emancipation, therefore, as a duty, and yet to admit that 
it may rightly be gradual, in the only possible sense of 
the term, i. e. take place at intervals, involves a contra- 
diction. The advocates of gradual emancipation, to be 
consistent, must rest the whole question of slavery and 
emancipation on the ground of expediency. It cannot 
be morally wrong to hold slaves at all, and yet right to 
hold one for a day, another for a month, another for a 
year, and so on. The same moral law which makes 
emancipation a duty demands at once the emancipation 
of every slave, or in other words, immediate emancipa- 
tion. To talk of gradual emancipation as a duty, because 
slaveholding is morally wrong, would be a mockery. 

There is a sense, to be sure, in which the word eman- 
cipation is often used, namely, as synonymous with en- 
franchisement, in which the word gradual may be applied 
to it, when spoken of as a duty, without impropriety. It is 
worth while, however, in using these terms in connexion 
with domestic slavery, to observe a distinction between 
them, for I apprehend that not a little of the doubt and 
confusion that has prevailed on this subject has been 
owing to the want of it. 

The word enfranchisement is properly the more general 
of the two, and though sometimes used to signify merely 
deliverance from personal bondage or manumission, gener- 
ally also implies the endowing or being endowed with the 



* It may be thought that the state of serfs is an exception to this 
remark. Serfs are property, however, and not capable by law of 
holding property themselves. They are essentially slaves. 



IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 29 

privileges of a freeman, or with those civil rights which 
grow out of the institution of society. Emancipation, on 
the other hand, strictly denotes merely manumission, and 
does not necessarily imply more, than the restoration of 
lost natural rights, than the mere cessation of personal 
thraldom ; it may be complete, and yet give but a small 
amount of liberty. 

Now it is not likely that any sincere friend of the 
negro slaves, however ardent, would speak of at once 
bestowing upon them all the " rank and privilege " of 
freedom now possessed by the whites. That justice and 
true expediency demand that those severe legal restric- 
tions which now oppress in a peculiar manner, as it has 
been seen, the present free colored population, should at 
once be removed, and that there should ultimately be no 
distinction made by the laws between the two races, 
there cannot be much doubt. Surely if nature has 
drawn a strong line of demarkation between the whites 
and blacks, we may safely trust to her laws for its pre- 
servation, without the aid of legal enforcements. If 
natural feeling does, as there is no doubt it does, forbid 
close aliances, it does not absolve either party from the 
obligations of human charity and Christian kindness ; 
and there is no cause founded in nature or recognised by 
religion, why both should not live together in amity, with- 
out either saying to the other, " I am better than thou." 
It has never appeared that men of African descent were, 
under equal advantages of education, less capable of per- 
forming the duties of freemen, than those of European 
origin, and certainly no harm has ever arisen from their 
possessing civil rights in those States where the laws do 
not entirely forbid it. It is not less certain, that mischief 
has been caused in the slaveholding States and some of 
the others, by shutting out emancipated slaves and their 
descendants from the enjoyment of all social rights, even 
from the privilege of instruction, thus nourishing in the 
bosom of those communities a class of persons who can 
have but little interest in the preservation of order, be- 
cause they are without the hope of bettering their own 
condition by steady industry, having the means of gain- 
ing only the scantiest living in honesty. And here let 



30 IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION, 

me protest against that most unfair argument, which 
would draw from the present condition of the free people 
of color in the Southern States an inference unfavorable 
to the cause of general emancipation. In the first place, 
they cannot, as was before remarked, rightly be called 
free, while they labor under their present disabilities. 
Secondly, the universal employment of slave labor in 
those States has hitherto made emancipation, except in 
rare instances, equivalent to expulsion from wonted 
homes, accustomed occupations, and old associations. 
The testimony of almost though not quite all slaveholding 
communities at the present time is in accordance with 
the remark of Mr. Archer of Virginia, that the free blacks 
in slaveholding States are doomed by a fixed social law 
to a want of occupation. What wonder, then, that they 
should become " miserable wretches, herding together in 
towns," where having gone for employment, they are 
exposed without safeguard to every temptation, and learn 
at length to " subsist chiefly by plunder." Admitting 
this account as fair, to what is the mischief owing ? 
To slavery, which forbids the employment of free labor- 
ers, and to an emancipation which opens to the blacks 
no sphere for honest industry, and affords no hope of 
ultimate elevation by useful and respecta*ble living. Let 
a market for free labor be opened by a general emanci- 
pation, the advantages of instruction become general, 
and the hope of speedily though gradually rising in the 
enjoyment of civil and political privileges be held out to 
them, and the case will be a very different one. 

It is said, that slaves will often prefer slavery to free- 
dom, and who can wonder at the choice, when to be 
freed is indeed to be let loose, nay to be turned adrift, 
houseless and forlorn, unprotected by the laws, and sus- 
pected by the whites ; and to have their former com- 
panions made to shun them, as they would the shadow 
of the Upas. Such is not the emancipation contended 
for by any friend of the blacks, nor is it the only one 
practicable. This is an emancipation by law, with of 
course the consent of the masters, who must be the 
makers of the law. An act, which, while it secures the 
rights of the slaves, shall also secure those of the mas- 



IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 31 

ters ; while it continues to the slave his accustomed 
occupation, his wonted domicile, and his familiar com- 
panions, shall secure to the master his former laborers, 
and the means of still employing his capital, which is 
not less his rightful means of support, than the work of 
the slaves' own hands is theirs. The usual routine of 
occupations for the one and the other should be as little 
broken in upon as possible, substituting only in the slave, 
for the brutal stimulus of the lash, or the fear of the lash, 
the more quickening one of self-interest, and the con- 
scious exercise of power ; and taking from the master 
only the ability to be cruel, to give to him a better 
power, that of visibly aiding in the developement of new- 
born energies, and the formation of true character. 
Such emancipation, binding together only more strongly, 
by the powerful yet flexile tie of" identity of interest and 
sympathy of feeling," those who had been bound mainly 
by the ties of fear and rigorous laws, has heretofore been 
given, and no reason has been shown why it cannot be 
again. 

The above statement supplies an answer to the objec- 
tion which has been made to emancipation, that it is 
attempting to raise the slaves faster than circumstances 
will allow. (Amer. Quart. Rev., No. 23, p. 217.) Im- 
mediate emancipation is not sudden elevation, it is but 
an act removing the tremendous obstacle to all improve- 
ment and all elevation, which exists in the law that 
makes them property. The change is less in the actual 
and present condition of the negroes, than in the promise 
offered by the future. The emancipated slaves are still 
but debased and ignorant human bemgs, but a way of 
advancement is opened to them, that was hopelessly 
closed before. For this change they cannot be unpre- 
pared. No man, while he retains the essential attributes 
of his nature, can become unfit for that degree of civil 
liberty which is implied in his ceasing to be a chattel, in 
his receiving the protection of the law in the enjoyment 
of life, limbs, health, reputation, the right of property, 
and of such amount of personal liberty, or of the power 
of loco-motion, as may not be taken from him by the 
very just exercise of civil authority. 



33 IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 

" Civil liberty," says Blackstone, " is no other than 
natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws (and no 
farther) as is necessary and expedient for the general 
good of the public." Is not this definition, from its 
very nature, a commission broad enough to enable society 
to protect itself against any real or supposed dangers 
that may ensue from emancipation ? It seems to me un- 
philosophical if not preposterous, when the civil power 
is so supreme, to say that the only mode of preserving 
order in a slaveholding community is by the perpetuation 
of that very system of entire and absolute subjection of 
individuals of one class to those of another, which is 
itself the whole source of the unfitness and incapacity 
for freedom complained of Those who favor the con- 
tinuance of slaveholding not only assume that the slaves 
need restraint, and to have others provide for them, but 
that domestic slavery is the only system by which these 
objects can be accomplished. They seem to forget that 
the law can coerce, and that vagrancy and beggarly idle- 
ness may be crimes ; that the moral influence of masters 
over their slaves need not cease upon emancipation, and 
that those who have been guardians before, can be guar- 
dians still. There will remain the same means of gov- 
erning in many respects as before. These means were, 
fear with some, kindness with others, habit and long- 
established authority with all. The last will not lose 
their force, and for the first there will be a substitute. 
Strict and peculiar laws will doubtless at first be necessary. 
But it has never yet been shown that a system of police, 
which shall not transgress the principles of civil liberty, 
may not be sufficient to preserve tranquillity among a 
body of men whose physical power will not be increased, 
and who must remain morally feeble, until long after 
they will have become accustomed to the new order of 
things. It ought not to be forgotten, that the chief source 
of discontent and mischief will be removed with their 
servitude. The negro, imbruted as he is, is still a rea- 
soning animal, and if it were certain, instead of being 
more than doubtful, that at present his only notion of 
freedom is of a state of listless idleness, can he not be 
made to understand that in declaring him no longer a 



IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 33 

slave, the necessity for labor will not be removed, that 
he must work or starve ; and that should he help himself 
out of the property of others, he will be punished for 
it just as certainly, if not quite as severely, as though 
be were not emancipated. 

That the colored population of this country, now con- 
stituting one sixth of the whole, will always remain here 
admits of hardly a doubt. There are, to be sure, some 
who appear still to dream of removing it. But one would 
think that a scheme, which, at the end of sixteen years 
from its adoption, having during that space of time had 
the united support of much of the wisdom and popular 
feeling of a great portion of the country, presents even 
less hope of ultimate accomplishment than it did at the 
beginning, would scarce now be looked to as a practicable 
one. The people of this country have no choice, but 
must allow the colored race to remain in the land, to 
which they came for no pleasure of their own. There 
is no alternative, but to exterminate them ; when that 
shall be recommended, it will be time enough to talk 
about it. The only question is, whether they are to 
remain for ever as slaves, or at some time or other to 
become free laborers. If slavery is to be abolished at 
any time, what possible gain is there in delay. Is it 
that the slaves may be better prepared for the change ? 
But what mockery is this, when no effort is making 
to prepare them, and each year sees them as a class 
sinking lower and lower in the scale of being. If pre- 
paration is necessary, why is it not begun 1 It never will 
be begun, until men have resolved at all events speedily 
to abolish slavery. For so long as it is thought to pre- 
serve it, knowledge will be feared for the slaves. " Do 
you teach your slaves to read the Bible?" asked a 
Northern of a Southern lady, some ten years since ; " Oh 
no ! only some favorite and trusted ones," was the reply, 
" for it makes them want to be free." And so it will 
always make them want to be free, and slavery to be safe 
will ever need ignorance for its handmaid. With emanci- 
pation, but never without it, can knowledge safely come ; 
with emancipation, but never without it, will the mind of 
the slave expand, and his now hidden powers be unfolded. 



34 OBJECTIONS TO EMANCIPATION, 

I have spoken of direct abolition of slavery by law 
as the duty of those with whom the power lies. When 
it is asked, how this is to be done, the answer is, there is 
the light of history to guide us, there are the lessons of 
experience upon the emancipation of slaves that we may 
study. The laws which would need to be enacted for the 
new order of things, must of course vary in different sec- 
tions of the country, according to the previous habits of 
the slaves, according to their character and condition, and 
to the kind of labor in which they have been employed. 
But the leading princples, which have been adopted in 
all previous emancipations, are, for all that has ever been 
shown to the contrary, capable of application again and 
in this country. For it is remarkable, that all the most 
important arguments which have ever been brought 
against the speedy emancipation of the slaves in the 
United States, apply with equal propriety to emancipa- 
tion in any country, and in any mode. The whole 
argument of an article in the twenty-third number of the 
American Quarterly Review, which has been already 
referred to, goes to prove the impossibility of ever libe- 
rating those who have once been in servitude. The 
strongest instances of the evils of emancipation are 
drawn from the history of Eastern Europe, and from 
the condition of the serfs of Poland and of Hungary. 
The argument, if it has proved any thing, therefore, has 
proved a great deal too much. For though there may 
be some in the country who stand ready to say that 
slavery is good for man, and who think a great deal too 
much is granted to the friends of emancipation, when 
it is allowed that liberty is always better, yet such a 
doctrine will not be either generally admitted, or very 
openly maintained, at the present day. The love of 
liberty and its great truths have taken too strong hold 
on the public mind of Europe, as well as America, to 
admit of the doctrine of divine right and legitimacy 
being defended here, even though it be confined to " the 
domestic institutions of the South." The remark often 
made therefore to abolitionists, that they offer no deter- 
minate plan for the accomplishment of their object, seems 
to me at present an idle objection. They are not called 



OBJECTIONS TO EMANCIPATION. 35 

upon to offer a detailed project of emancipation, nor would 
it be of the slightest advantage to their cause at this time. 
The public mind is not yet ready to admit the thought 
of having two million and a half of people of color in 
this country who shall not be slaves, and who of course 
will be rightfully looking forward to some share in civil 
and political privileges. There is yet a great deal to be 
done to bring even the people of a single State to be- 
lieve, that a general emancipation within its limits may 
be effected without violent convulsion, and without involv- 
ing great sacrifice of property, or the risk of having no 
laborers at all, instead of those, who, now performing only 
reluctant tasks, they imagine will then become paupers 
and vagabonds. 

Objections to Emancipation. It will be the purpose 
of the remainder of these remarks to answer, by the 
evidence of well authenticated facts, the foregoing three 
capital objections to a general and early emancipation. 
My object will be to show, 

First. That with the consent of the masters a gen- 
eral emancipation of all the slaves might be effected with 
no farther delay, than the passing of the necessary laws 
would occasion, without more danger than will be in- 
curred by the continuance of slavery. 

Secondly. That the abolition of slavery is not neces- 
sarily, and probably would not be in fact, productive of 
any other than a trivial pecuniary loss to the masters. 

Thirdly. That if emancipated, the slaves would ade- 
quately maintain themselves by their own labor, and that 
the proprietors could procure from them an equal amount 
of labor, and at as little cost, after as before emancipa- 
tion. 

In point of fact, all three of the objections would be 
answered with the last. For in spite of the horror that 
is felt of immediate emancipation, no sensible person 
would suppose that danger would result from the meas- 
ure, except from the slaves yielding to a natural indolence 
of disposition, and soon suffering from famine, abandon- 
ing themselves to disorder and pillage. The mere act 
of emancipation will not lead to violence except through 
previous idleness and want. And as, if the emancipated 



36 IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION NOT DANGEROUS. 

slaves continue their labors, there v.'ill be no disorder, 
so there will be no pecuniary loss to the masters. Slaves 
are valuable for the work they perform ; if their owners 
are sure of getting as much work out of them at no 
greater cost, after as before emancipation, they can 
have no pecuniary interest in witholding from them 
their freedom. As these objections, however, are each 
brought forward in a distinct form, it seems worth 
while to answer them separately. But before going far- 
ther, let me premise that there are two positions which, 
in pursuing the enquiry, I feel at liberty to assume. 
First, that negro slavery as it has existed in law and 
practice, and so far as the mere relation of master and 
servant is concerned, has not varied materially in the 
diiferent parts of the New World where it has prevailed. 
It is generally thought, that though more strict in law, 
it has been more humane in practice in the United States 
than elsewhere. The difference, if there has been any, 
would probably be in our favor in the case of emancipation. 
Secondly, that the character of the African race is, in 
all its material points, the same in this country and in the 
West Indies and South America. Instances taken from 
other Cis-Atlantic countries, therefore, may be considered 
fairly adducible as examples and illustrations here. 

Immediate Emancipation not Dangerous. On first 
thinking of the effect of emancipation, one would natu- 
rally suppose that the granting a great boon to the slaves, 
for such assuredly they would think their liberty to be, 
would lead to any thing rather than acts of violence. 
He would expect it to strengthen the bonds which united 
the kind master and the affectionate slave, while it 
soothed the refractory and won the obstinate. Yet how 
often is it spoken of as the necessary and immediate 
precursor of outrage and desolation. It is not to be 
overlooked that those who apprehend these results, 
suppose that the first thought of the slave upon emancipa- 
tion will be gratification of revenge, revenge for treatment 
which it is denied has been otherwise than kind, and 
that, in the second place, he possesses means for this 
gratification which he did not possess before. If the 
slaves desire blood, it does not appear that there is any 



IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION NOT DANGEROUS. oi 

thing to prevent their seeking it before emancipation, 
wliich will not also prevent it afterward, and if they 
have not the desire now, the act of emancipation does 
not seem likely to create it. There is an inconsistency 
between these apprehensions, and the strong assertions 
of the very persons who profess them, which is truly re- 
markable. 

If there is little reason a priori for apprehending 
danger 'from emancipation, there is little also from the 
lessons of experience. It may safely be said, that his- 
tory does not contain an instance of convulsion or outrage 
produced by the general emancipation of slaves by law, 
however sudden it may have been. Suddenly acquired 
freedom may have been, as it is very likely to be, abused, 
where it has been obtained by a hard fought contest. 
The first draught of liberty to the oppressed and injured 
people of France, flushed and excited as they were by 
the struggle which gave it, was more than they were 
able to bear ; but those who have read the philosophical 
memoirs of Dumont, and other fit witnesses of those 
early days of the revolution, will perhaps doubt whether 
wise and timely concessions, united with a firm and dig- 
nified maintenance of their rights, on the part of the 
king and nobility, would not have brought peace to the 
troubled kingdom, when its mad career was scarce begun. 
The excesses were the consequence of the successful 
overcoming of resistance, not simply of newly acquired 
freedom. No one doubts that freedom, suddenly acquired 
by successful insurrection, would be terribly abused on 
the part of the negroes, bui when voluntarily bestowed on 
them by their masters, that the result would be the same, 
is contradicted by reason and experience. 

The dangers, apprehended from the sudden acquisition 
of their freedom on the part of the slaves, are not of 
course attributed to the difference of color between them 
and their masters. Whatever evils this may produce, 
they will not appear at first. Those dangers of eman- 
cipation are supposed to have their origin in the nature 
of man, which renders him incapable of adapting him- 
self readily to a great change of circumstances. It has 
already been said, that this change would be less in re-^Jity 



38 IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION NOT DANGEROUS. 

than is commonly imagined. But such as it is, it must 
Ije as great to slaves of one race as of another, if their 
previous condition were equally abject. What, then, was 
the case in Europe 1 The ansvrer is in the words of 
M. Sismondi, " the profoundest historian of the age." 
After speaking of the great advantages that might be 
hoped from the emancipation of the slaves in the British 
colonies, he says, — 

" It would be bold to promise such a result by the 
application of any theory whatsoever ; but one might 
with confidence and modesty invoke the lessons of ex- 
perience. He v.ho would not dare trust to his own 
speculations to decide the fate of so many thousand in- 
dividuals, might, with some assurance, have recourse to 
history, that great depository of social experiments. What 
has been done might be done again, only observing and 
judging well the analogy of circumstances. We know 
that the whole of Europe has been once subject to the 
slave system. In the country we now inhabit, every cul- 
tivator of the land, almost every artisan, was the property 
of rapacious, and often of cruel, masters. The slaves, 
bv whom th€ whole work '\y\^ Europe was done, were as 
debased and oppressed as are now the African slaves in 
the colonies. This state of things has ceased in the 
whole of Western Europe, and even where the emanci- 
pation has been sudden, it has ceased without shock, 
violence, or rebellion. — A more attentive study of the 
history of slavery in Europe teaches us, that its abolition 
was neither a philanthropic nor a religious work ; that it 
was simultaneous in vast districts and in whole provinces ; 
that the slave-peasantry of many villages having been 
enabled, by the accumulation of their scanty savings, to 
purchase their freedom from their masters, the advantage 
to these last became so evident, — the value of their land 
increased so rapidly, — their revenues were so greatly 
au^rmented, — that all who witnessed the effects hastened 
to follow the example, and innumerable serfs were every 
where enfranchised. A few corporate bodies only, attach- 
ed by a common prejudice to all that is ancient, resisted 
this amelioration ; so that slavery was still preserved in 



IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION NOT DANGEROUS. 39 

some domains of the Church, in France, and Germany, 
till towards the end of the eighteenth century." * 

The foregoing quotation will perhaps be referred to 
again. At present I have only to remark, in the first 
pFace, that M. Sismondi evidently considers the British 
act of emancipation as in no small measure a work of 
philanthropy ; and, secondly, that he considers tlie eman- 
cipation of the white slaves of Europe as possessing 
strong points of analogy to the emancipation of the negro 
slaves of the West Indies. This last idea will not proba- 
bly be readily received here. Fortunately, however, we 
are not left wholly to conjecture, with regard to the results 
of the general and simultaneous emancipation of large 
numbers of negro slaves, and to all the appalling accounts 
of the supposed inevitable consequences of such emanci- 
pation there is this reply ; that so far as the testimony of 
experience is a proper guide in this momentous question, 
it is entirely against the doctrines of the alarmists. In 
Mexico and Colombia, in Guadaloupe and St. Domingo, 
thousands of negro slaves have been sinmltaneously 
manumitted, without, in any instance, convulsion, vio- 
lence, or insubordination being the consequence. 

Emancipation by private individuals on a large scale, 
and without any moral preparation on the part of the 
slaves, began in Mexico early in this century. An ac- 
count of the effects of this measure on the productiveness 
of the estates on which it was adopted, by Mr. Ward, 
late British envoy at Mexico, will be quoted at length 
hereafter. It will serve my present purpose to say 
merely, that in 1808 there was not a single slave re- 
maining on several of the largest estates, and that in 
18'26 slavery had been entirely abolished in one of the 
largest cane-growing districts in Mexico, and that not 
the slightest disorder had in any instance ensued. In 
1820 slavery was for ever abolished in Mexico by a de- 
cree of the government, which " desired to signalize the 
anniversary of its Independence by an act of national jus- 
tice and beneficence, that should more and more confirm 



* Nevsr Monthly .Magazine, No. 7, Boston edition, pp. 1, 2. 
Article by J. C. L. de Sismondi. 



40 IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION NOT DANGEROUS. 

public tranquillity." Nor has the least disturbance of 
public tranquillity ever been heard of as the consequence 
of this act. We have the evidence of a New England 
gentleman, who resided for some time in Mexico, that 
the measure was highly beneficial. " No one was made 
poor by it ; it gave property to the servant, and increased 
the wealth of the master." He considered the result so 
favorable to the interest of all concerned, as to afford an 
important example to the United States. (Mrs. Child's 
Appeal, p. 97.) 

During the war of the revolution in Colombia all slaves 
who joined the Colombian armies were declared free. 
Bolivar himself emancipated all his own, to the amount 
of several hundred. Many of the wealthy proprietors 
folio vv^ed his example. On the 19th of July, 1821, it 
was ordained by the" Colombian Congress, that after that 
day no slave should be born in Colombia. A fund was 
at the same time established for redeeming as rapidly as 
possible all who were still held in servitude, so that now 
the period of the total extinction of slavery in Colombia 
is nearly at hand. It is perfectly well known, and uni- 
versally acknowledged, that no disturbance of public 
peace and no injury to the welfare of either proprietors 
or slaves was produced by this measure. A perfectly 
competent witness, M. Ravenga, has said that it pro- 
duced a degree of docility on the part of the blacks 
before unknown. Some of the unbelievers in the fitness 
of the blacks for emancipation have denied any authority 
to this example, because the newly emancipated slaves 
found employment and strict discipline in the army.* 
Supposing that had been the case with all of them, which 
is far from true, do the objectors mean to say that the 
discipline of an army violates the principles of civil 
liberty and natural justice to the same extent with the 
laws of slavery 1 And if not, they grant, of course, that 
sufficient restraint can be exerted without such violation, 
which is all that I desire to show. 

It is certain, however, that vast numbers of slaves were 
suddenly and simultaneously emancipated in Colombia, 

* American Quarterly Review, June No. 1833. 



EMANCIPATION IN GUADALOUPE. 41 

without the least injury to themselves or hazard to the 
public peace, and who did not enter the army, but con- 
tinued tranquilly at their labors as before. Colonel Duane, 
in his Narrative of a Tour in Colombia, speaks of his 
visit to a large sugar plantation of Bolivar's, which he 
found in fine order, and upon which he was told by the 
blacks themselves that there were no slaves employed. 

Admiral Fleming stated before the Committee of the 
House of Commons, that " during the three different 
times that he visited the Caraccas, subsequent to the act 
of emancipation, he never saw any disorder, and never 
heard of any, except such as were occasioned by po- 
litical causes." He stated also, that after the emanci- 
pation of slaves by Bolivar's order the cultivation of sugar 
had increased in Colombia, and that on his second visit 
he found a very visible improvement in the general cul- 
ture of the land, and the condition of the blacks. 

Passing over many instances of peaceful emancipation 
on a large scale, one more exactly in point occurs in the 
history of Guadaloupe. 

" Guadaloupe, in common with all the colonial pos- 
sessions of France, partook of the convulsions with which 
the revolution of 1792 so violently agitated the mother 
country. And in that colony the contests of the partisans 
of royalism and democracy, and those of the white and 
colored colonists, were carried on with a fury which 
could not fail to excite the slaves, who, from time to time, 
were called in to aid the contending parties. No insur- 
rection, however, properly servile, followed ; and the 
slaves who were not converted into combatants continued 
their usual labors. In February, 1794, the French Con- 
vention passed a decree, giving liberty to the slaves in 
all the colonies of France. This decree was carried 
into effect in Guadaloupe, under certain local regulations 
called La Police Rurale, which was administered, in the 
different districts of the island, by commissioners ap- 
pointed by the government. By these regulations the 
laborers were entitled to a fourth part of the produce of 
the estate which they were employed in cultivating, in- 
dependently of their food, which was wholly furnished 
from the estate. The only deductions to which this 
c2 



42 EMANCIPATION IN GUADALOUPE. 

fourth part was liable, before it was divided in fixed 
proportions among the laborers, were the expenses of a 
medical attendant and medicines, and of packages for 
their own share of the produce. All other expenses 
of every kind, including taxes, were to be defrayed 
from the other three fourths. The shares of laborers 
absenting themselves from labor were to be reduced in 
proportion to the length of their absence, and the sums 
thus deducted were to be added to the shares of those 
who had labored regularly. — Under these regulations 
agriculture appears to have flourished, after a vigorous 
government had repressed the furious intestine commo- 
tions among the different political parties of whites, and 
between the whites and the free people of color ; and in 
April, 1801, we have an enumeration of the plantations 
then under cultivation, amounting to 390 of sugar, 1,355 
of coffee, and 328 of cotton, beside 25 pasture or grass 
farms. In the succeeding year, on the peace of Amiens, 
a powerful French force was sent to take possession of 
Guadaloupe, and to reduce the negroes to their former 
state of slavery. This attempt was resisted on the part 
of the negroes, and it was not till after a severe struggle, 
and dreadful slaughter, that they were again brought 
under the power of the cart- whip ; for what will not men 
who have once felt it endure, to escape that calamity ? 
The accounts from the island immediately preceding this 
€vent were most satisfactory. The reports of the com- 
missioners of different cantons to the local government 
speak of the tranquillity which reigned in the agricultural 
districts, and on the plantations ; and the government, 
on the other hand, in its circular addresses to the com- 
missioners, dwell upon, it most anxiously and sedulously 
as an essential part of their duties, that while they en- 
force order and regularity among the laboring classes, 
they should maintain their just rights, and secure to them 
the full measure of the remuneration to which they were 
entitled for their labors ; punishing with exemplary se- 
verity proprietors who should be guilty of any failure in 
this respect, or of any other conduct towards the laborers 
which should be inconsistent with the claims of humanity 
and justice. The regulations by which the rights and 



EMANCIPATION IN GUADALOUPE. 43 

privileges of the laborers were guarded were ordered, by 
the law, to be translated into tlie Creole dialect, to be 
posted up in conspicuous places, and to be read and ex- 
plained once a month on every estate. We have before 
us a letter addressed by the supreme council of the 
colony, in February 1802, to the Commissary Valluet 
of the canton de Deshayes, to this effect : ' We have 
received. Citizen Commissary, your letter of the Gth in- 
stant, with the different returns relating to the payment 
of their fourth to the cultivators. We perceive with 
pleasure that you have devoted your attention to this 
most essential branch of your administration. It is in 
exercising this justice towards the men whose sweat is 
the source both of our private and public wealth, that 
you can alone acquire a right to exert your authority to 
enforce upon them the due performance of their duties. 
Continue, Citizen Commissary, to maintain that order in 
your canton which now reigns universally throughout 
the colony. We shall have the satisfaction of having 
given an example which will prove, that all classes of 
people may live in perfect harmony with each other, 
under an administration which secures justice to all 
classes.' 

" In the Moniteur of 19 Germinal, an 10, (April 1802) 
there is inserted a communication from Guadaloupe, 
dated in the preceding February, stating that all was per- 
fectly tranquil in that colony. ' Cultivation,' the writer 
adds, ' has never been discontinued, and although the last 
sugar crop happened to be not very productive, yet there 
is now considerable produce in hand, and the next sugar 
crop is likely to be large.'"* 

But all the colonists were not pleased with this state 
of things ; and Bonaparte, having troops to spare after 
the peace of Amiens, sent General Richepanse to restore 
slavery in the island. Had the slaves been tired of their 
liberty, such a measure would scarcely have been ne- 
cessary. And that they had not abused it, might be 
inferred, if it had not already been shown, from the 
instructions given to the French general. These were, 

" Anti-Slavery Reporter. No. 70, pp. 463-465. 

i)3 



44 INSURRECTION IN ST. DOMINGO. 

" That if the mulattoes and negroes of Guadaloupe re- 
ceived the French with pleasure, he should employ means 
to induce them to revolt, that he might have a pretence 
for attacking them."* Richepanse, it appears, did re- 
sort to these nefarious measures ; and the result was, 
that 20,000 negroes laid down their lives in defence of 
their liberty, and then, and not till then, was slavery 
restored. A practical commentary this on a common 
assertion, that suddenly emancipated slaves soon sicken 
of their fatal gift of freedom. 

" This result, unfortunate as it was, does not prove 
the unfitness of the slaves of Guadaloupe for the liberty 
that had been granted to them ; and which, as we have 
seen, was granted under circumstances of public dis- 
turbance, particularly unfavorable to their quiet en- 
joyment of its blessings. When we take into view all 
those circumstances, it is impossible not to feel that the 
case of Guadaloupe is so far from justifying the anticipa- 
tions of our opponents, that it furnishes an undeniable 
confirmation of the general view we have ventured to 
give of this subject, namely, that an act of emancipation 
by the supreme government, in quiet and peaceful times, 
accompanied by such precautionary measures as would 
be obviously expedient, and not resisted but acquiesced 
in by the masters, might be carried into complete effect, 
without the slightest danger to the public tranquillity, 
and with the most unquestionable advantage to the slaves 
themselves." t 

The last instance which will be adduced is more im- 
portant than any other. It is that of St. Domingo, and 
its consideration and right apprehension is particularly 
important, because its " horrors," as they are emphati- 
cally called, are so continually the theme of those who 
believe, or profess to believe, the extinction of slavery in 
the United States a hopeless case, and the discussion of 
it criminal. The history of Hayti during the last forty 



* Richepanse communicated this to General Moreau, and the 
latter to Colonel Malenfant, in 1805, at Morrisville, near Philadel- 
phia. Vid. Memoirs of St. Domingo, by Malenfant, note, p. 98. 

t Anti-Slavery Reporter, No. 70, p. 465. 



INSURRECTION IN ST. DOMINGO. 45 

years is important to the question of negro emancipation 
on two accounts. First, as it illustrates the immediate 
eflfect on the public safety of an act of sudden and 
general emancipation. Secondly, as it affords testimony 
respecting the disposition of the blacks to voluntary in- 
dustry when left entirely to themselves. The whole 
history of Hayti may be against the fitness of negro 
slaves for entire freedom, without its affecting the question 
of the danger of immediate emancipation. It is simply 
as it relates to this last point that it will now be consid- 
ered. The history of the island subsequent to its inde- 
pendence, and of its present condition and prospects, 
will be taken up in another place. 

Our means of information respecting the important 
events of the last eight years of the eighteenth century 
in Hayti are sufficiently ample. There are among us 
living witnesses of the most exciting portion of them, 
and we have the published testimony of actors and eye- 
witnesses of the whole. That able but most prejudiced 
writer Bryan Edwards has left us a picture of a portion 
of the events as they appeared from one point of view, 
and Malenfant and Lacroix, participators in the losses, 
anxieties, and partial successes of the times, have 
sketched them from another. But there, is nothing im- 
portant to the purpose in hand, as to which the testi- 
mony conflicts. And if any person will from either of 
these sources, or any other now attainable, bring any 
thing to show that the emancipation of the slaves upon 
that fated island was the cause of massacre, of pillage, 
or of tumult, I for one will give up the whole question. 

At the commencement of the French revolution, the 
French colony of St. Domingo occupied the western and 
most fertile third of the island. The whites were in 
number 30,000. They were divided in their politics as 
were their fellow-countrymen at home, and party spirit 
ran high. The number of slaves was 480,000. The 
mulattoes or free people of color were 24,000 in number, 
many of them polished and wealthy, but all oppressed with 
great burdens and civil disabilities. They had strong 
friends in France, and in March, 1790, a decree was 
passed, giving to them an equality of civil rights with 
c4 



46 INSURRECTION IN ST. DOMINGO. 

the white colonists. The execution of this decree was 
resisted pretty effectually by the latter, until, in August, 
1791, an insurrection broke out among the negro slaves 
of the northern province near Cape Francois.* Of the 
details of this dreadful rebellion it would be to no pur- 
pose to speak. Suffice it to say, that it did not spread to 
the southern or western provinces, where, although the 
mulattoes were in arms, the slaves remained quietly at 
their labors ; t and that, if the slaves in some instances 
showed they could be demons in outrage and cruelty, 
there were not wanting instances on their part of the 
most faithful kindness, and heroic devotion to their mas- 
ters. There is little doubt that a timely concession on 
the part of the white colonists would, at no long interval, 
have restored tranquillity and subordination, had not 
the commotions been kept alive by the uncertain and 
vacillating policy of the National Assembly. As it was, 
the civil war, for it was not wholly servile, the blacks, 
strange to say, being on the side of the royalists, and at 
first even wearing the white cockade, lasted until 1793, 
when three commissioners, Santhonax, Polverel, and one 
other arrived in the island with instructions to grant the 
demands of the mulattoes, and with 6000 troops to aid 
in restoring order. They were not of course very accept- 
able to the white planters, who were displeased at seeing 
persons of color receive commissions in the army of the 
republic. They found large numbers of the blacks in 
arms in the north, under Jean Biassou and Toussaint 
Louverture. In the south and west the slaves were 
peaceable and at work ; the mulattoes, some of them in 
arms. The commissioners were very assiduous, though 
not perhaps very judicious, in the discharge of their 

* It is possible that some persons have regarded the Bill of 
Rights of the National Assembly passed in 1789, which bill it was 
the intention of the act of March, 1790, to enforce in the colonies, 
as an act emancipating all the slaves. It certainly was never 
meant as such or understood as such in France or in the colonies. 
Its operation was never supposed to extend beyond the free people 
of color. The insurrection of the slaves did not commence until 
two years after. On the origin of this insurrection, vid. Edwards's 
History, Note on Oge. 

f See Edwards and Malenfant. 



EMANCIPATION IN ST. DOMINGO. 47 

official duties ; but they had not been long engaged in 
them, when there arrived at Cape Franrois a M. Gal- 
baud, with a commission of governor, which was to 
supersede their commission. The rivals met in the city 
of the Cape, and, in consequence of some informality 
in his appointment, M. Galbaud was finally persuaded 
or compelled to return to his ship. Before he left the 
harbour, however, a quarrel arose between some of his 
party and some of that of the commissioners, which 
led to a bloody conflict in the streets of the city. The 
sailors in the harbour all joined Galbaud, as did some 
regiments of the line and some of the citizens. The 
commissioners were supported by the troops under 
their command and the mulattoes, but fearing to be 
overpowered, sent to Biassou and Toussaint, who were 
without the city at the head of the insurgents, and 
offered their freedom to all who would join the army 
of the republic. The offer was refused by them. 
The fight had commenced on the 20th of June, and it 
lasted to the next day. The sailors becoming intoxi- 
cated, committed the greatest excesses, putting to death 
indiscriminately all colored persons whom they met. 
On the 21st the city was entered by about 3000 blacks, 
who it does not appear had ever heard of the offer of 
the commissioners, and who took side w^ith neither 
party. The whites were panic stricken, and all who 
could, made their escape in the vessels that were in the 
harbour. The blacks having, as their first step, libe- 
rated several hundreds of their comrades, who were in 
the prison, plundered, and then set fire to the city.* 
Santhonax and his colleague, however, remained un- 
harmed. " This," says Malenfant, " is the history of the 
burning of the city of the Cape," the catastrophe of that 
awful drama, the insurrection of St. Domingo. It was 
during the two years preceding this event that those 
massacres and conflagrations occurred, which have left 
so indelible an impression on the memories of all who 

* If there is any thing which could give color to the assertion, that 
the act of emancipation was productive of excesses, it is this inci- 
dent of the descent upon the Cape ; but it is plain that the blacks 
concerned were not newly emancipated slaves. 



48 EMANCIPATION IN ST. DOMINGO. 

were living at that time. Immediately aftei^ tJtis event 
the commissioners, urged by some of the wealthiest pro- 
prietors, and assured by Toussaint that nothing else 
would restore tranquillity in the colony, decreed the total 
abolition of slavery in the northern province. 

And as far as the slaves were concerned, tranquillity 
certainly was restored. Toussaint and many of his fol- 
lowers joined the army of the republic. Biassou retired 
into the Spanish provinces, and finally to Spain. Soon 
afterward Polverel issued another edict in the south, 
abolishing slavery there also. " He caused to be opened 
a government register, in which all the citizens might 
sign the liberty of their slaves," and all did sign but 
one. These slaves in the south and west had been 
quiet during the troubles in the other parts of the colony. 
And was this state of things changed by the act of 
emancipation ? Colonel Malenfant, himself a proprietor, 
assures us, that " After this liberty the negroes remained 
tranquil in the south and ivcst, and continued their labor 
upon all the plantations.^^ Upon some of the estates, 
which, in consequence of the disturbances and the fear 
of the mulattoes or free persons of color, who were in 
arms near Port au Prince, had been abandoned by the 
proprietors and stewards, " the negtoes continued their 
labor under the direction of inferior agents ; and after- 
wards, when no whites remained to guide them, they 
betook themselves to planting provisions. Wherever the 
whites remained upon the plantations, the negroes tran- 
quilly continued their labors." — " Do not talk to them," 
he says elsewhere, " of the restoration of slavery, but 
speak of freedom and their fourth, and you will chain 
them down to their labor. What did Touissaint do ? 
What did I do before his time in the plain of the Cul de 
Sac, on the plantation Gouraud, during more than eight 
months after the emancipation of the slaves ? Let those 
who knew me at the time, let the blacks themselves be 
asked ; they will all reply that not a single negro upon 
that plantation, where there were more than four hundred 
and fifty laborers, refused to work ; and yet this planta- 
tion was thought to be under the worst discipline, and 
the slaves the most idle of any in the plain. I inspired 



EMANCIPATION IN ST. DOMINGO. 49 

the same activity into three other plantations of which 
I had the management." 

Such is the evidence of a slaveholder, who was no 
visionary advocate of *' the rights of man," but a French 
gentleman, who had a deep interest at stake in the pros- 
perity of the colony. Such was his opinion of the best 
means of managing the ignorant African slave, and rous- 
ing him to industry. 

This unquestionable testhnony to the good conduct of 
the negroes, suddenly emancipated under the most unfa- 
vorable circumstances, is confirmed by Bryan Edwards 
himself, who nevertheless has not spared his vituperations 
upon the authors of the measure. The negroes were 
told, he says, that they must not abandon their work, 
but must continue upon the plantations or else join the 
army, and the greater part of them preferred the former 
course, and were, he expressly adds, even '* more than 
usually orderly and industrious."* How can evidence 
be more explicit or satisfactory as to the early operation 
of the act of emancipation ? These witnesses could not 
have been deceived, and they cannot be misunderstood. 

In 1793, immediately after the emancipation, the 
island was invaded by the English forces from Jamaica, 
who came with the intention of restoring slavery, and 
adding another to their West India colonies. Thus be- 
gan a war that lasted five years, during which the in- 
vaders gained neither honor nor advantage. The war 
was finally concluded by a treaty between the English 
commander and Toussaint, commander-in-chief of the 
French forces. 

Thus was peace at last restored after seven years' 
war, during which the planters were divided against each 
other. During the two first in the northern part of the 
colony, large numbers of the slaves were in arms, and of 
course a great portion of the eflicient laborers were with- 
drawn from cultivation. This interruption, added to the 
great destruction of property by the insurgents, would 
alone account for vast diminution of the products of the 



* See note on the act of Emancipation in St. Domingo. Ed- 
wards':* History. 



50 EMANCIPATION IN ST. DOMINGO. 

island, between the years 1791 and 1798, had no change 
been made in the condition of the cuUivators. It is 
enough at present, however, to say, that so far as the 
public tranquillity was concerned, the act of emancipa- 
tion, though made and executed at a most unfortunate 
time, produced nothing but good. As soon as the war 
of invasion was terminated, order and industry were 
restored, and the colony was in a constantly progressive 
course until 1802. During this interval, and for some 
years previous, the affairs of the colony were adminis- 
tered by Toussaint, who held it as a dependence of 
France. To his successful administration we have the 
most unqualified testimony. " The colony," says Malen- 
fant, " flourished under Toussaint ; the whites lived 
happily and at peace upon their estates, and the blacks 
continued to work for them." 

General Lacroix, also, who published his '' Memoirs 
for a History of St. Domingo," in 1819, informs us, that 
when Santhonax, who had been recalled to France by 
the government, returned to the colony in 1796, " he 
was astonished at the state in which he found it on his 
return." " This," says Lacroix, " was owing to Tous- 
saint, who, while he had succeeded in establishing perfect 
order and discipline among the black troops, had suc- 
ceeded also in making the black laborers (in the north) 
return to the plantations there to resume cultivation." 
The same author tells us that in the next year (1797) 
the most wonderful progress had been made in agricul- 
ture. He uses these remarkable words. " The colony 
marched as by enchantment towards its ancient splendor ; 
every day produced perceptible proofs of its progress. 
The city of the Cape and the plantations of the north 
rose up again visibly to the eye." * 

It would be easy to multiply testimony to the success 
of the measure of emancipation in St. Domingo during 
the time of Toussaint. We shall merely add that of 



* The system under which this was accomphshed was similar in 
most respects to that adopted in Guadaloupe. The white colonists 
who remained spared no pains to bring it to perfection, and it 
has never appeared that any of them were dissatislied with the 
phange. 



REVOLUTION IN HAYTI. 



51 



General Vincent, now or lately living in Paris, who was 
a proprietor in the colony at that time. lie was sent by 
Toussaint to Paris in 1801, to lay before Bonaparte the 
new constitution. He found an expedition fitting out for 
the purpose of restoring slavery. He remonstrated to 
no purpose ; assuring the First Consul, that such a 
measure was at once unnecessary and impracticable. 
He told him that every thing was going on well in St. 
Domingo; that the proprietors were in peaceful posses- 
sion of their estates ; cultivation was making rapid 
progress ; and the blacks were industrious, orderly, and 
happy. But his entreaties were of no avail. Leclerc 
landed at Cape Francois. The war which followed began 
with perfidy on the part of the invaders. Toussaint, 
seized by treachery, perished in a dungeon of France. 
The blacks under Dessalines and Christophe fought with 
desperation, and vied with, though they could not equal, 
the whites in cruelty. Either party intended to make it 
a war of extermination. An immense amount of prop- 
erty was destroyed. The sugar-works were all ruined, 
and so great was the devastation, that for a time the 
necessary food could scarcely be procured. The attempt 
of the whites was unsuccessful, and, after near two years 
of the most horrible and cruel war, they were glad to 
take refuge on board of an English squadron. Thus 
France lost her colony, and the Haytians gained their 
independence. How they have used it ; whether it has 
been a blessing or a curse, it is not my purpose now to 
inquire. It is sufficient to say, that up to the period of 
the iniquitous attempt to restore slavery in the colony, 
the most perfect harmony prevailed between the white 
planters and those who were once their slaves. The 
former continued to be treated with respect, and the 
latter were gradually rising from the abyss of ignorance 
and degradation in which they were sunk, previously 
to their emancipation. It is only between the years of 
179S and 1802 that the history of Hayti affords a fair 
sample of what may be the result of the extinction of 
slavery in the British colonies, or in the United States. 
During that period the island was quiet and prosperous, 
and its people orderly and happy. 



52 REVOLUTION IN HAYTI. 

It seems to me that, whatever may be the inference as 
to the disposition and capacity of the blacks for volun- 
tary and self-directed industry, which is drawn from the 
whole history of Hayti for the last forty years, it is plain 
that there is nothing in that history to sustain the notion 
of the awful dangers of immediate emancipation, when 
bestowed freely and graciously by the masters themselves. 
On the contrary, although this great experiment was 
tried in a colony already distracted with civil and servile 
war, and under the apprehension of foreign invasion, 
there did not result from it the least outrage upon the 
persons or property of the whites, or the least disturbance 
of public peace and safety. The slaves whom the act 
of emancipation found at their labors did not desert 
them, and those who were in arms against the republic 
took service under its banners, or returned to the cultiva- 
tion of the soil. 

The instances which have been cited are the most 
important upon record. I think, therefore, that I am 
justified in saying, that neither reason nor experience 
teach that there is necessarily any thing to be appre- 
hended from the general and simultaneous emancipation 
of slaves, when accompanied with just regulations de- 
fining and enforcing the duties which would spring from 
the new relations of the master and the slave, now be- 
come citizen. I of course presuppose the consent of the 
former, and their hearty cooperation with the laws. 
For the slaves being utterly destitute, would be almost 
as much at their mercy directly after, as before emanci- 
pation. If the masters choose to withhold from the 
slaves employment ; if they take from them their houses, 
their clothing, and their tools, thus resisting the benefi- 
cence of the law, and setting themselves at once in 
hostility to those to whom by every claim of justice, and 
every motive of interest, they are still bound as friends, 
they can first make them miserable, and then, goading 
them into frenzy, cause if they will the verification of 
their own prophecies. The cry of danger proceeds from 
the fear that the slaves are unfit to become freemen ; the 
real hazard is, that their masters are not ready to treat 
them as such. The slaves miffht be made to feel that 



EFFECTS OF EMANCIPATION ON PROPERTY. 53 

the object of their emancipation was their and their mas- 
ters' mutual good ; that the benefit was certain if each 
party would be faithful ; and that it depended not more 
upon one than the other. But the masters, as the supe- 
riors in power and intelligence, must set the example 
of fidelity. If they fail in their duty, they can hardly 
expect the ignorant negroes to be true to theirs. 

The Abolition of Slavery icill not cause great Pecu- 
niary Loss to the Masters. This objection, which is next 
to be considered, lies in fact equally against gradual and 
immediate emancipation. What is its nature 1 It is 
said that the emancipation of slaves would be an almost 
ruinous sacrifice of the acquired rights of one party to 
the abstract rights of another. It is even said that the 
abolition of slavery throughout a State would bring a 
loss it could not bear ; and that the whole country must 
share the burthen ; as if there were a bona fide destruc- 
tion of property to the full amount of the market value 
of all the slaves. And it is to be observed, that this 
objection is urged by many who fully acknowledge the 
claim of the slave to his freedom, and who have no mis- 
givings as to his adequately supporting himself and 
becoming a profitable free laborer. Now I ask of what 
valuable vested right does the emancipation of a slave 
deprive the master ? The value of his right consists in 
his claim to the services of the slave during his life, in 
return for which services he is obliged to feed and clothe 
the slave. If he is assured of retaining those services 
at no dearer rate, he will lose nothing by emancipation. 
This is so plain that the only pretence of loss, which a 
thinking man could urge, would be that the services 
of the negro as a slave are of more value to the master 
than his services as a freeman. Now it has already been 
remarked, that, excepting in the cultivation of a few arti- 
cles of tropical produce, the labor of freemen is cheaper 
than that of slaves. This is acknowledged universally 
with regard to whites, and by some with regard to blacks. 
With respect to the latter, however, it is not allowed by 
all, many presuming a difference in the natural dispo- 
sition of the races which is not warranted by facts. On 
the justice of this presumption the issue depends. As 



54 EFFECTS OF EMANCIPATION ON PROPERTY. 

it is the most important point in the question, I have 
reserved it to the latest. Under the next head I shall 
consider the probability of the emancipated blacks 
remaining on the soil, and working for hire, and the 
possibility of raising sugar, &c. by free labor. At pres- 
ent I take these points for granted. The importance 
and the great prevalent misconception of the question 
of injury to property demand for it a more full examina- 
tion. 

First, let us consider the effect of a general emanci- 
pation on the wealth of a State. Let us suppose that 
Georgia, for example, which State employs herself all the 
slaves she can raise, were by an act of her legislature to 
emancipate at once her two hundred thousand slaves, 
still retaining them of course as free laborers at their 
accustomed occupations. What would she lose ? Not 
one jot or tittle of her property. Her wealth is made 
up now of her lands and houses, her cattle, her slaves, 
and her half million of freemen. Abolish slavery, and 
what is it then ? The same in all things but one. In- 
stead of two hundred thousand slaves with no other than 
animal power, she has as many freemen with an indefi- 
nite capacity of improvement, a productive power far 
greater than before. She has gained in wealth by 
annihilating all property in slaves. If her individual 
citizens have suffered loss, she can herself afford to com- 
pensate them. 

There is nothing new or strange in the above, but a 
misapprehension exists as to the nature of slave prop- 
erty, which produces doubt and uncertainty in many 
minds. We value wealth according to our use and en- 
joyment of it. We wish to call things our own, that we 
may be assured of having this use and enjoyment, and 
most articles of property can be used and enjoyed only 
while they continue such. A machine owned by no one, 
is used by no one ; a house that has no possessor, has 
no inhabitant ; even a horse, to be of use, must have a 
master. I speak of course of communities governed by 
laws. Not so a man, for he can be an owner and a 
master to himself; and nature and all experience tell us, 
that since it is his own will which must put his powers 



EFFECTS OF EMANCIPATION ON PROPERTY. 55 

in exercise, he will be of the greatest value to society, when 
conscious of himself profiting by the exertion of that 
will, and in proportion to it, he brings his utmost powers 
into action. So far as society is concerned, the emanci- 
pation of slaves may be looked upon as merely a transfer 
or restoration of property in human beings from second 
to Jirst persons, and this property is necessarily more 
available to society in the hands of the latter than of the 
former, for then the prime motive to exertion acts directly 
upon the very will on which the exertion itself ultimately 
depends. If by emancipation the master suffers loss, the 
slave is to an equal amount a gainer, the State then 
stands at least as well as before. 

But what has the master lost, if he retain the services 
of his w^orkman at no dearer rate than before ? I am 
considering the case of the slaveholder who is a planter 
also. After the purchase money has been paid, all that 
the master can get from the slave is his services for life ; 
in return, he is at the expense of his maintenance and 
that of his family, at all times.* He will be at no greater 
expense for the free laborer, and will be equally sure of 
his services. So long, then, as he intends remaining a 
planter, he will be no loser. If the purchase money has 
been sunk, it was sunk before the emancipation. But 
suppose the purchase money is considered simply as capi- 
tal invested, for which interest is received by the master 
in the income which the slave's labor brings him, over 

* " He who regards the labor of the slave as gratuitous to the 
master is a bad calculator." The master is obliged to maintain the 
slave with his family, old and young, well and ill, busy and idle. 
And the whole cost of this bears as great a ratio to the amount of 
work accomplished by the slave, as do the wages of the free 
laborer to his w^ork. Otherwise slave labor would be cheaper than 
free. The injustice to the slave consists in this, tbat in depriving 
him of the only stimulus which will induce him to put forth all his 
powers, the master deprives him pro tanto of the use of tho'^e 
powers ; and this injustice is not lessened by the fact that the 
master himself does not profit by them. The excess of 'labor 
which a man would perform if working for his own benefit, 
above what he will perform when working for the benefit of an- 
other, is totally lost by the slave system. The course of the slave's 
master in this respect is, unconsciously to him perhaps, very like 
that of a certain dog in the fable. 
D 



56 EFFECTS OF EMANCIPATION ON PROPERTY. 

and above the cost of his maintenance. After emanci- 
pation the proprietor receives his interest just as con- 
stantly, in tlie excess of the income from the work of the 
free laborer, over the wages paid him. 

Tt is only in case the proprietor wishes to sell his 
property, then, that he seems likely to incur a loss. Here, 
it may be said, the loss will surely come. The planter 
has originally bought his land, and then, at an equal cost 
perhaps, stocked it with slaves. He wishes to sell, but 
can offer only his land ; his outlay in slaves is lost to 
him. This is not a fair statement, however. He can put 
into the market only his land to be sure ; a plantation, 
but no slaves. But this land is already peopled, the 
plantation is stocked with free laborers, who are bound 
to the soil by a tie as strong as an owner's title could have 
been, the tie of self-interest and old associations. The 
income of the estate is as great as when the slaves made 
a part of it, and will be as certain and as regular. 
Would it be unjust in the proprietor to demand, as the 
price of his plantation, the whole original cost of the 
land and slaves both, since a fair income may be de- 
pended upon for the whole capital thus invested ? Cer- 
tainly not, and this he would do. The only change, then, 
which emancipation will necessarily produce upon the 
master's property, will be to fix the whole price of the 
slaves and land upon the land alone, the estate being 
worth to all intents and purposes precisely as much as 
before. In this calculation, I of course assume the 
success of the scheme of emancipation as it respects the 
conduct of the slaves. I suppose them to work as well 
as before. If they work better, the value of the property 
will be enhanced in a corresponding ratio. The fol- 
lowing extract from Phelps on Slavery, where the state- 
ment is made on the authority of Niles's Register, will 
illustrate and confirm the above remarks. 

" The value of the houses and lands in Pennsylvania 
increased, in fifteen years, — from 1799 to 1814, — 
ninety millions of dollars more than those of Vir- 
ginia, though Virginia is the largest. The valuation of 
the houses and lands in New York and Pennsylvania, 
under the United States' assessments, the principle of 



EFFECTS OF EMANCIPATION ON PROPERTY. 5/ 

valuation being the same in each case, was more than 
six hundred millions of dollars, while that of the houses 
and lands, and more than a million of slaves beside, of 
Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, 
Kentucky, and Tennessee, with a much larger area of 
land, and more than tVvicc the number of inhabitants, 
was less than five hundred and twenty millions — nearly 
one sixth less." 

The experience of past instances of emancipation is 
in accordance with these principles. I leave out of con- 
sideration the immense moral effect of the extinction of 
slavery, which will infallibly, sooner or later, produce an 
hundred fold increase of Wealth to the people among 
whom it occurs- 

There are, however, two classes of persons who vvould 
suffer loss by an act of general emancipation, let its re- 
sults be ever so favorable to the planters and to the slaves 
themselves. One consists of those persons whose only 
property is in slaves, and who are supported by letting 
out their services for hire. The other comprises those 
landholders who raise more slaves than they require for 
their own use, actuated by the demand for them in other 
quarters, which they supply in a regular course of trade. 
This class it has been seen is principally to be found in 
the more northern slaveholding States, where the present 
high value of the slaves depends mainly or wholly on the 
internal slave trade. The loss which would be incurred 
by the abolition of slavery in either of these States, 
would be equally incurred by the prohibition of the in- 
ternal slave trade. It is not perceived that the claim for 
indemnity would be stronger in the former than in the 
latter case ; and in this, such claim would rest precisely 
upon the same ground, that exists in every case of 
depreciation of property, in consequence of any act of 
legislative interference, or change of policy. Had Mr. 
Verplanck's proposed Anti-tariff t)ill passed into a law in 
1833, it would have caused very heavy losses to mer- 
chants and manufacturers in this section of the coun- 
try. It would perhaps have ruined many meritorious 
individuals, who had invested their whole capital in a 
particular trade, on the faith of the laws of Congress. 



58 EFFECTS OF EMANCIPATION ON PROPERTY. 

Was it wrong that the Tariff should be repealed ? I say, 
no. Others may disagree. But had the act passed, 
vv'ould the losers have claimed indemnity ? Probably not, 
for they would scarce have expected it. Yet I can see 
no claim which could be urged by the slaveholder who 
should incur a loss by the prohibition of the internal slave 
trade, or by the legislative abolition of slavery, which 
would not be equally good to the loser by the repeal of 
the Tariff. And I do not believe that the loss among an 
equal population would be as great in the former case, 
as it would have been in the latter. For it is to be con- 
sidered, that while the market value of the slaves in 
Virginia and other midd|e States would " sink to a 
cipher," if the internal slave trade were prohibited, still, 
in that case and in case of the abolition of slavery, much 
the largest fraction of the present slave population would 
continue to find employment within the State to which it 
belonged, and it is more than possible that in a few years 
the revivified industry of the State would give employ- 
ment to all the laborers she could produce. In strict 
justice all loss on capital invested on the faith of govern- 
ment, sustained by individuals in direct consequence of 
a change in the policy of that government, ought to be 
compensated. There is one very essential preliminary, 
however, which is that the loss should be clearly proved. 
It is never to be taken for granted as the result of eman- 
cipation in any State. When proved, whether it be small 
or great, there is a fair claim for indemnification. This 
was not denied by the abolitionists of Great Britain. 
The claim cannot and ought not to interfere for one 
instant with the rights of the slave. This freedom is due 
to him at all events. The matter of indemnity is an 
after affair between the proprietor and the State. They 
have been parties in an act of wrong, and if in righting 
that wrong a loss comes wholly upon one party, the other 
is bound in honor to relieve it. A government must 
respect its own contracts even in revoking them. But 
it is exceedingly important that a very common notion, 
that slaveholders actually lose by the extinction of slavery 
the full market value of the slaves, or even what is an 
approximation to it, should be done away. 



BLACKS CAPABLE OF VOLUNTARY INDUSTRY. 59 

" The Colonists," says a writer in the Westminster 
Review for October, 1829, " have tried to frighten the 
Government and the country, by holding out the neces- 
sity that, in the event of the emancipation of their slaves, 
they should be paid for them ; and some of the friends 
of emancipation have been weak enough to show an 
inclination to admit the principle. Suppose now, that 
an Irish pauper, in the days when Irishmen worked their 
horses by the tails, had been interfered with by the parish 
officers with a view to put an end to his barbarous prac- 
tice, and had answered, ' If your honors stop my allow- 
ance till I give over working my horse by the tail, I 
hope you mean to pay me what I gave for him, and allow 
me to 2Vork him in harness besides.' This is a fair state- 
ment of the West Indian proposition." 

And so it is of the question of indemnity in the case 
of emancipation every where. The master has a better 
servant than before, and the value of his property in his 
fellow-man has reverted to his land. For what is he 
to be indemnified ? * 

Blacks Capable of Voluntary Industry. The third 
and last position that I wish to establish is, that if eman- 
cipated, the blacks would adequately maintain themselves 
by their own labor, and that the proprietors would pro- 
cure from them an equal amount of labor, at as little 
cost after as before emancipation. If this is not true, 
we may not infer the future from the past, or else there 
must be some great and essential peculiarity in the 
negro's character. White slaves have been suddenly and 
in large numbers emancipated, and their industry has 
been augmented by the change. Why may we not ex- 
pect this of blacks ? Are these not men, have they not 
the same wants, and are they not influenced by the same 
motives as other men ? But they are a peculiar sort of 
people, it is said, and cannot be dealt with as whites. 

* It is obvious that the case of emancipation with deportation or 
" colonization " is a very different one. There a loss is occa.-ioued, 
for which the proprietor has a claim to the full amount of the slaves' 
market value. If the planting States had to choose to-morrow be- 
tween emancipation with and emancipation without deportation, I 
have no doubt they would prefer the latter. 
d2 



60 BLACKS CAPABLE OF VOLUNTARY INDUSTRY. 

" In the free black, the prmciple of idleness and dissi- 
pation triumphs over that of accumulation and the desire 
to better our condition ; the animal part of the man gains 
the victory over the moral ; — the free black will work 
no where but by compulsion." Such opinions may be 
the result of a very limited and superficial observation, 
but not of careful inquiry. 

We have in America known the blacks chiefly as 
slaves. Until during the last half century they were 
known as such only to the civilized world. In this 
situation their character was judged, and men referred 
to the race defects and vices which belonged solely to the 
condition. Are not slaves the same every where ? Are 
not white slaves and even white freemen, when kept in 
hopeless poverty and ignorance, degraded, grovelling, 
beastly, as truly as blacks ? In the former as well as the 
latter, does not the desire of repose prevail over that of 
accumulation, sensuality over the love of improvement, the 
animal over the moral nature ? The history of all nations 
and all times gives sad evidence that it is so. Judge not 
the negro, then, by his character while a slave, or while 
the marks of his chains are on him. 

Hear the words of an intelligent traveller, Dr. Walsh. 
" The first impression of all this," (the sight of the 
negro slaves of Rio Janeiro) " on my mind was to 
shake the conviction I had always felt, of the wrong 
and hardship inflicted on our black fellow-creatures, and 
that they were only in that state which God and nature 
had assigned them ; that they were the lowest grade 
of human existence ; and that it was not surprising that 
people who contemplated them every day, so formed, so 
employed, and so degraded, should forget their claims 
to that rank in the scale of beings in which modern 
philanthropists are so anxious to place them. I did not, 
at the moment, myself recollect, that the white man, 
made a slave on the coast of Africa, suffers not only a 
similar mental but physical deterioration from hardships 
and emaciation, and becomes in time the dull and de- 
formed beast I now saw yoked to a burden. 

" A few hours only were necessary to correct my first 
impressions of the negro population, by seeing them 
under a different aspect. We were attracted by the 



BLACKS CAPABLE OF VOLUNTARY INDUSTRY. 61 

sound of military music, and found it proceeded from a 
regiment drawn up in one of the streets. Their colonel 
had just died, and they attended to form a procession 
to celebrate his obsequies. They were all of different 
shades of black, but the majority were negroes. Their 
equipment was excellent ; they wore dark jackets, white 
pantaloons, and black leather caps and belts, all which, 
with their arms, were in high order. Their band pro- 
duced sweet and agreeable music, of the leader's own 
composition, and the men went through some evolutions 
with regularity and dexterity. They were only a militia 
regiment, yet were as well appointed and disciplined as 
one of our regiments of the line. Here, then, was the 
first step in that gradation by which the black population 
of this country ascend in the scale of humanity ; the 
negro advances from the state below that of a beast of 
burden into a military rank, and he shows himself as 
capable of discipline and improvement as a human being 
of any other color. 

" Our attention was next attracted by negro men 
and women bearing about a variety of articles for sale ; 
some in baskets, some on boards and cases carried 
on their heads. They were all very neat and clean 
in their persons, and had a decorum and sense of re- 
spectability about them superior to whites of the same 
class and calling. All their articles were good in their 
kind, and neatly kept, and they sold them with simplicity 
and confidence, neither wishing to take advantage of 
others, nor suspecting that it would be taken of them- 
selves. I bought some confectionary from one of the 
females, and I was struck with the modesty and pro- 
priety of her manner ; she was a young mother, and had 
with her a neatly dressed child, of which she seemed 
very fond. As yet unacquainted whh the coin of the 
country, I had none that was current about me, and was 
leaving the articles ; but the poor young woman pressed 
them on me with a ready confidence, repeating in broken 
Portuguese, onto tevipo.'^ 

Lastly, he witnessed the performance of a funeral ser- 
vice by a black priest with peculiar decorum and solem- 
nity. He adds, 

d3 



62 BLACKS CAPABLE OF VOLUNTARY INDUSTRY. 

" I had been but a few hours on shore, for the first 
time, and I saw an African negro under four aspects of 
society ; and it appeared to me, that in every one, his 
character depended on the state in which he was placed, 
and the estimation in which he was held. As a despised 
slave, he was far lower than other animals of burden 
that surrounded him ; more miserable in his look, more 
revolting in his nakedness, more distorted in his person, 
and apparently more deficient in intellect than the horses 
and mules that passed him by. Advanced to the grade 
of a soldier, he was clean and neat in his person, amen- 
able to discipline, expert at his exercises, and showed the 
port and bearing of a white man similarly placed. As 
a citizen, he was remarkable for the respectability of his 
appearance, and the decorum of his manners in the rank 
assigned him ; and, as a priest, standing in the house of 
God, appointed to instruct society on their most important 
interests, and in a grade in which moral and intellectual 
fitness is required, and a certain degree of superiority is 
expected, he seemed even more devout in his impressions, 
and more correct in his manners, than his white asso- 
ciates. I came, therefore, to the irresistible conclusion 
in my mind, that color was an accident affecting the 
surface of a man, and having no more to do with his 
qualities than his clothes ; that God had equally created 
an African in the image of his person, and equally given 
him an immortal soul ; and that a European had no 
pretext but his own cupidity, for impiously thrusting his 
fellow-man from that rank in the creation which the 
Almighty has assigned him, and degrading him below 
the lot of the brute beasts that perish." * 

To estimate with tolerable fairness and accuracy the 
negro character, then, we must observe it under all cir- 
cumstances, and see if it appears in any, other than it 
should if formed from the common elements of human 
nature. View it as it appears in the home of the race, 
in burning Africa, where the day-star of civilization is 
just rising, where, no longer sunk in hopeless barbarism, 
the people are opening to better influences, and com- 



Walsh's Residence in Brazil, Vol. I. pp. 134-141. 
d4 



BLACKS CAPABLE OF VOLUNTARY INDUSTRY. 03 

merce is beginning to make some amends for tlie un- 
numbered woes she heretofore has caused them. 

" Already," says Major Denham, " the desire of ex- 
changing whatever their country produces, for the manu- 
factures of the more enlightened nations of the north, 
exists in no small degree among them (the Bornouese) ; 
a taste for luxury, and a desire of imitating such strangers 
as visit them, are very observable ; and the man of rank 
is ever distinguished, by some part of his dress being 
of foreign materials. It is true, that these propensities 
are not yet fully developed ; but they exist, and give 
unequivocal proof of a tendency to civilization, and the 
desire of cultivating an intercourse with foreigners." 

" All travellers in Africa," says Mrs. Child, " agree, 
that the inhabitants, particularly of the interior, have a 
good deal of mechanical skill. They tan and dye leather, 
sometimes thinning it in such a manner, that it is as 
flexible as paper. In Houssa leather is dressed in the 
same rich, soft style as in Morocco ; they manufacture 
cordage, handsome cloths, and fine tissue. Though igno- 
rant of the turning machine, they make good pottery ware, 
and some of their jars are really tasteful. They prepare 
indigo, and extract ore from minerals. They make agri- 
cultural tools, and work skilfully in gold, silver, and steel, 
Dickson, who knew jewellers and watchmakers among 
them, speaks of a very ingenious clock made by a negro. 
Hornemann says, that the inhabitants of Haissa give 
their cutting instruments a keener edge than the Euro- 
pean artists, and their files are superior to those of France 
and England. Goldberry assures us that some of the 
African stuffs are extremely fine and beautiful." 

The testimony of these earlier travellers, cited by 
Mrs. Child, is confirmed by the narratives of Denham 
and Clapperton, Caillie, and the Landers. These show 
us, that, with a fertile soil and tolerable agriculture ; 
manufactures of various and no mean kinds ; large 
and regular native fairs, which collect multitudes from 
great distances ; the interior of Africa possesses a popu- 
lation far from idle, lively, and quick of imitation ; that 
the native African can set himself to work, and, that 
whatever may be the case elsewhere, in his own half- 



64 BLACKS CAPABLE OF VOLUNTARY INDUSTRY. 

civilized land he manifests the desire of improvement, 
and shows within himself the progressive power of a 
man. " Amidst the moral darkness of the land also," 
says Mr. Murray, author of a ' Narrative of Discovery 
and Adventure in Africa,' " there shine forth virtues 
which would do honor to human society in its most re- 
fined and exalted state." 

Let it not be forgotten that the slave trade, at once a 
cause and an effect of moral debasement, is a refinement 
in barbarism, which, originally learned from the Moors 
on the one side and the Christians on the other, some of 
the most powerful princes are sincerely desirous of being 
rid of. 

" You say true," said the Sheikh of Bornou to Major 
Denham, " we are all sons of one father ! You say also 
that the sons of Adam should not sell one another, and 
you know every thing ! God has given you all great 
talents, but what are we to do ? The Arabs who come 
here will have nothing else but slaves. Why don't you 
send us your merchants ? You know us now, let them 
come and live among us, and teach us how to build 
houses and boats, and make rockets." The Sheikh re- 
ferred to the internal African slave trade. Fortunately 
he was addressing an Englishman. 

If we next observe the African on his first introduction 
to civilized life, not as a slave but as a freeman, we find 
strong confirmation of his readiness to adopt its arts, and 
of his facility in learning them. 

Dr. Mechlin, late governor of the colony of Liberia, 
stated on his return last winter, that the slaves who were 
captured in their prison ships and sent into Key-West, 
and afterward transported to Liberia by the Colonization 
Society, readily took to the cultivation of the soil, and 
proved better agriculturists, than those who had gone 
under the ordinary circumstances. They quickly showed 
themselves sensible of the advantages of good order and 
the arts of civilization, and desirous of securing these 
to themselves and to their families. The same is true of 
the colony at Sierra Leone. Great as have been the 
difficulties under which that community has labored, 
from the immense number of liberated Africans that 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. DO 

have been thrown upon it annually,* these people have 
still been introduced there, to the enjoyment of British 
freedom, and the protection as well as restraint of Brit- 
ish law, from a state of utter nakedness and want, and 
have learned to live upon the fruits of their own indus- 
try. 

Colonel Denham, governor of the colony, says in his 
first report in 1827, '* The propensities of the people 
located in the different settlements are very generally in 
favo?oTf agriculture." " I have not observed any disincli- 
nation to voluntary labor. It appears to be a system per- 
fectly understood and practised by the liberated Africans 
here." — Laborers' wages have varied from one shilling 
to sixpence per day, yet there has never been any de- 
ficiency of liberated Africans who were willing to work 
for hire. — '' An anxious desire to obtain and enjoy the 
luxuries of life is apparent in every village." — " The 
number of frame houses with stone foundations, and also 
of stone houses, has increased in all the villages. At 
Wellington there are already seven stone houses, all 
begun during the last two years. The owners of these 
houses, which cost them from one to two hundred dol- 
lars, have all acquired the means of so permanently es- 
tablishing themselves, by free labor and industry. They 
were nearly all landed here from ships after capture, and 
merely given a lot of ground, and rations for a time." 
The testimony of General Turner and Sir Neil Campbell, 
the previous governors, perfectly agrees with Colonel 
Denham's. 

Thus far, then, it does not appear that the laziness of 
the African is so extreme, his repugnance to labor so 
utterly invincible, as to insure his becoming a burden 
and a nuisance, if not kept under steady coercion. 

Let us turn next to our own country, not regarding 
the task of inquiry as idle or hopeless, though it is so 
confidently said that, "taken as a class, the free blacks 
must be considered as the most worthless and indolent 



^ From 25,000 to 30,000 in the course of twenty years. See 
account of Sierra Leone, taken from public documents, in Ami- 
Slavery Reporter, No. 59. 



66 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

of the citizens of the United States," and that " through 
the whole extent of the Union they are the drones and 
pests of society." If they are such in the Southern 
States, the causes have been already assigned. Indeed 
it would be a miracle if as a class they were not debased 
there. When white men have proved otherwise, under 
like circumstances, it will be time enough to condemn 
the blacks. 

The same causes operate in a measure throughout the 
Union. There is not a State in which unequal laws 
and illiberal customs have not weighed upon them. Not 
even in New England, the land of free schools, has the 
black any fair chance for instruction. The voice of 
encouragement rarely falls upon his ear. He is uni- 
formly excluded from the more respectable and lucrative 
employments. The ban which is upon his race damps 
all his hopes, and cripples all his powers. Hardly treated 
as a man, feeling that he is encompassed by many who 
" laugh at his losses, mock at his gains, and scorn his 
nation," it requires more than common energy to rise 
above the lowest level. Still he has done this here, and 
the experience of our own country is sufficient to demon- 
strate that the character of the black will, like that of 
other men, be elevated in proportion to the influences 
which surround him. 

The assertion that the physical and moral condition 
of the Southern slaves is preferable to that of the free 
people of color, when it refers to those of the latter class 
in New England, is too idle for contradiction. For in 
proportion to their property and education there is no 
class among us whose standard of comfort is higher, than 
that of the colored population. They are neat and 
economical in their households, diligent in seeking for 
employment, and steady and faithful in their labor. As 
it respects the habits of civilized life and all the arts of 
an advanced state of society, they are much before the 
laboring Irish ; and this any one who has had the oppor- 
tunity of comparing them will affirm. 

I have spoken of them as a class ; there are among 
them individuals, who claim higher merit, and scanty as 
their means of self-improvement have been, are men of 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. D/ 

no inconsiderable cultivation, and of more than ordinary 
force of character. In truth, it will be thought by many 
perhaps, and justly too, that in attempting to show the 
blacks not incapable of civilization, I give an undue advan- 
tage to the opponents of emanci}>ation. For this ground 
is not now debatable, however it might have been thirty 
years ago. Those citizens of the United States, who choose 
to consider it so, evince an ignorance only equalled by 
their presumption. This country is the only one where 
the term '' gentleman," when applied to a man of color, 
appears a solecism. It matters not whether there have 
been, or no, men of African descent distinguished for 
genius in philosophy or the arts, in literature or science. 
It is enough that they have shown themselves capable 
of appreciating the labors of others ; that in mental and 
moral culture, and in their habitual breeding, they have 
appeared fit associates for cultivated men of the European 
race. That they have done this, and in numbers too 
great to be considered as exceptions to a general law, 
we have the most undoubted testimony.* 

To recur, however, to the precise point in discussion, 
the aptitude of the colored race for voluntary labor, it 
is a fact undeniable, that, in New England at least, they 
are industrious without the whip. As a laboring class, 
feeling the same stimulus with the whites, they accom- 
plish as much ; and do not suffer by comparison in any 
point of view. t Instances are as frequent among them 
as among the whites, of men who by the sweat of their 



* For proof of the intellectual power of the blacks, there is no 
work to which I -would so soon refer the sceptical as IVIackenzie's 
" Notes on Hayti." In spite of his unfavorable account of the 
condition of the peoj)Ie, there are so many instances given of in- 
dividual talent and cultivation, which fell within his oun observa- 
tion, that no one can read his book without being convinced that 
the blacks are men, to be judged by the same standard with others 
under like circumstances. 

t When the records of our penitentiaries have been l)rought in 
judgment against the blacks, it has been overlooked that they arfe 
absolutely forced, by exclusion from the higher schools, and from 
the more lucrative employments, to remain among (he poorest of 
our population, and that their want of education is even greater 
than their want of properly. To the two groat sources of tonptatiou. 



68 FITNESS OF THE BLAC^ FOR FREE LABOR. 

brows have acquired ft)r] themselves at middle life a 
moderate independence, "if in the Southern States they 
are " the drones and pests of society," it is because the 
whites have chosen to make them so. Not even the 
presence of slavery would have produced such a result, 
if it were not for the cruel intolerance of the laws. 

But these lav/s, it is said, are essential for the protec- 
tion of the whites. Protection against what 1 An evil 
of their own making. They have changed man, as far 
as they could do it, into a brute, and when he has been 
goaded with insult, and could bear oppression no longer, 
it has been found that still closer coercion was needed ; 
still heavier chains to weigh him down. But since the 
black is still a man, and must always have the sense of 
one, would it not be wiser as well as more humane, to treat 
him as such at once, and, removing all provocation to 
malice, bind him by that law of kindness and of human 
sympathy, which all hearts acknowledge, and his sooner 
than any. 

Wherever negro slavery has prevailed, it has been for 
the interest of the masters of course to make the con- 
dition of the free people of color as little enviable to 
the slaves as possible ; and they would naturally be dis- 
posed to believe and to represent them as indolent and 
essentially worthless. Such, accordingly, has been the 
policy of slaveholding communities in the West Indies, 
not less than in the United States. But the question of 
the fitness of the blacks for free labor, and their capacity 
of providing adequate maintenance for themselves and 
their families, has been most carefully examined in Eng- 
land during the last few years, and the evidence upon it 
thoroughly sifted. So far as the West Indies are con- 
cerned, nothing can be more complete and unanswerable 



then, poverty and ignorance, they are peculiarly exposed, and it is 
unjust to consider the amount of crime committed by them, compared 
with that of the whole population, as giving the ratio of the crimi- 
nality of the two races. The greater part of the crime in every 
community is 'committed by the poor and the ignorant, and the 
true ratio will be obtained only by comparing the respective amount 
of crime in those of the two' races, who belong to classes corre- 
sponding in property and education. 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 69 

than the case made out in favor of the blacks by their 
friends in Great Britain. 

" The time was," says an able writer,* " when it 
might be disputed, whether the African could be induced 
to labor by the motives w^hich are found to operate on 
all other species of the human race. As regards those 
who are already free, this can no longer be considered 
as problematical. That even the emancipated slaves 
would support themselves by their own labor, will not 
be doubted by any one who has the slightest knowledge 
of their habits, and of the very small amount of labor 
v/hich would suffice to place them in comfort. Even 
now, it must be recollected, the slaves chiefly support 
themselves by their own voluntary labor on their pro- 
vision-grounds." 

'' It is assumed," remarks the Archdeacon of Barba- 
dos, " that the slaves will become idle on obtaining their 
freedom ; but this is mere assumption.^' 

" The report of the privy council (1788) speaks, on 
the authority of witnesses from the British West India 
Islands, of the ' invincible repugnance of the free negroes 
to all sorts of labor.' Messrs. Fuller, Long, and Chis- 
holm declare, that ' free negroes are never known to 
work for hire, and that they have all the vices of the 
slaves.' Mr. Braithwaite states, that ' if the slaves in 
Barbados were all offered their freedom on condition of 
working for themselves, not one tenth of them would 
accept it.' Governor Parry reports, that ' free negroes 
are utterly destitute of industry ; ' and the council of the 
island add, that, ' from their confirmed habits of idleness 
they are the pests of society.' — {Report, 1788, part 3.) 
Strange, that in the face of these declarations, proceed- 
ing from persons in high official trust and authority, the 
free blacks have, by their superior industry, driven the 
lower order of whites from almost every trade requiring 
skill and continued exertion ! I believe that not one in 
twenty of the working shoemakers in Barbados is a white 
man. The working carpenters, masons, tailors, smiths. 



* Josiah Conder, Author of " An Essay on the Comparative 
Cost and Productiveness of Free and Slave Labor." 



70 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

&c, are for the most part men of color ," and this at a 
time when a large white population are in the lowest 
state of poverty and wretchedness. In the application 
for casual charity, the number of white persons soliciting 
relief is far greater than that of the free colored. The 
free black and colored inhabitants have always con- 
tributed in their full proportion to the parochial taxes, 
for the support of the poor whites ; while their own poor 
receive no parochial relief, but are supported by private 
contributions among the more wealthy of their own 
color. Do these facts indicate habits of irreclaimable 
idleness ? "* 

The following is an abstract of the account of pauper- 
ism in several of the British slave colonies, given in 
Returns which were laid before the House of Commons 
in 1826. The returns embrace a period of five years, 
from Jan. 1, 1821, to Dec. 31, 1825. 

In the Bahamas the number of white and colored 
poor relieved annually was very nearly equal. The 
number of free colored persons was double that of the 
whites. 

In the Barbadoes the white population is threefold 
that of the people of color. In the five years nearly a 
thousand of the former annually received relief to one 
black. 

In Berbice the free colored population was one half 
larger than the white. " In 1822 there were 17 white 
and 2 black paupers." 

In Demarara the number of whites is double that of 
the free persons of color. The ratio of paupers is pre- 
cisely inverse. 

In Dominica there were " more than 9 white paupers 
to 1 black in the same number of persons." 

In Jamaica the proportion of white paupers to colored, 
according to the whole population, was nearly 4 to 1. 

In Nevis it was as 28 to 1. In St. Christopher's it was 
decidedly in favor of the colored population, and in Tor- 
tola it was as 14 to 1. 

It appears, then, that in the West India Islands the 



Eliot's Christianity and Slavery, pp. 225, 226. 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 71 

free people of color could not be complained of as 
" drones," although they might be as *' pests," for they 
would seem to have driven the whites out of employ- 
ment.* 

Is there any imaginable reason, so far as the blacks 
are concerned, why, if they will labor for wages in 
Trinidad and Jamaica, they should not in Virginia and 
the Carolinas ? I can conceive of none. It may be said, 
indeed, that, although the people of color already free are 
capable of voluntary labor, this will not be the case with 
the newly emancipated slaves. To meet this, we have 
the undeniable fact that a very large proportion of the 
slaves even now perform labor that is not compul- 
sory. Wherever the mildness of the laws and the in- 
dulgence of their masters permits them to acquire and 
hold property of their own, they are found desirous of 
doing so, and work with double industry when working 
for themselves. With regard to the slaves in the British 
colonies this was most fully established, and the truth of 
the general assertion was not denied even by pro-slavery 
witnesses, with one or two exceptions.! If the sight of 
voluntary industry in the slave has been more rare in 
this country than elsewhere, it is because custom and the 

* In the Island of Trinidad, where there are from 16,000 to 
17,000 free people of color, we learn from the Report of the treas- 
urer of the colony, that there is no fund raised or required for the 
support of the poor. Half the property of the island is said to be 
in the hands of these people, and they are constantly advancing 
in the arts of civilization. " In Jamaica there are 40,000 free 
persons of color. At the close of the session of 1824, when the 
community had been disturbed for months with vain and unfounded 
alarms of servile insurrection, a committee of the assembly drew 
up an elaborate report on its internal state, which concludes thus : 
' Their [the free people of color] conduct evinced not only zeal 
and alacrity, but a warm interest in the welfare of the colony, and 
in every way identified them with those who are the most zealous 
promoters of its internal security.' " 

t In this resi>ect tlie Report of the Committee of the House of 
Commons on the Extinction of Slavery, containing the evidence of 
twelve witnesses for the Anti-Slavery party, and twenty-one for 
the planters, is a very remarkable document. The only points 
apparently, which the latter had any hopes of establishing were, 
that the slaves were v/ell off in their present condition, and that 
they would not, after emancipation, do that voluntarily which they 



72 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

laws afford less security to its rewards. Why should he 
toil whose wages are never sure, and when gained may 
be taken from him with impunity 1 (See Stroud's Laws 
of Slavery ; section on the right of property in the slave, 
pp. 45-50. The case cited in note to page 49, deserves 



acknowledged they did before. They failed most signally in proving 
either, notwithstanding some aid from citizens of the United States. 

From an analysis of that report published in London I shall 
make a few extracts. 

Mr. Taylor, a gentleman who had resided fifteen years in 
Jamaica, stated, that, " Soon after he took charge of Papine, a 
long line of fence w^as to be made between that and the Duke of 
Buckingham's estate, formed by a trench of four feet deep, with 
a mound thrown up. It is usual to do such labor by task-work, at 
so many feet a day. The laborers complained that they could not 
pei'form it in the usual hours of labor. The overseer, on the other 
hand, affirmed that they w^ere imposing upon Mr. T., and it w^as 
solely owing to sloth that they did not easily get through their 
task. The overseer wished of course to get as much work as he 
could, and they had naturally an indisposition to do more than they 
could help. They were told to resume their work the following 
morning, and, if they performed it within the time, they should be 
paid for every minute's or hour's additional work they might per- 
form. They began the task at five in the morning, and had finished 
it by half-past one, and the very slaves who had before complained, 
received pay for four hours' extra labor." — '• They were, generally 
speaking, very industrious in laboring on their provision-grounds. 
It was a frequent practice to work for one another for hire, the 
hire being 20d. currency a day (14(Z. sterling), and a breakfast, 
Mr. Wildman indulged his negroes with fifty-two Saturdays in the 
year, instead of twenty-six, the number allowed them by law, 
that they might be able to attend divine service, and have no ex- 
cuse for continuing to w^ork on Sunday. This gave them additional 
time ; and as Mr. T. had a large garden, and was very unwilling 
to draw from the labor of the estate to keep it in order, he w^as 
frequently in the habit of hiring them to work there. Some w^ould 
come and offer their services, for w^hich he gave them their break- 
fast and 2s. lid. a day currency, being 2s. Id. sterling. He w^as 
decidedly of opinion that, when an offer was made to pay negroes 
for their labor, they were always ready to work. He had known 
them, even when digging cane-holes, perform the task of 120 
cane-holes, and, on being offered pay, dig 20 and 40 cane-holes, 
after having finished their task. But, by the ordinary method, the 
same quantity would not have been dug except by tremendous 
whipping. Ninety cane-holes indeed on unploughed land was the 
general task ; but 120 if the land had previously been loosened 
by the plough. The farther exertion, however, produced by the 
stimulus of wages was such that the driver said it was too much 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 73 

attention, as an exception it proves the rule.) It has 
again and again occurred that slaves, who have worked 
night and day for their freedom, have, when their ta^^k 
was well nigh done, been sold to another master, with 
him perhaps to go through again the same sad routine 
of anxious labor and bitter disappointment. 



for them, and begged Mr. Taylor to interdict their doing so much. 
At the end of the week almost every slave had done so much extra 
work as to receive 3s. -Id., which he paid them, according to agree- 
ment. If they had worked in the usual way under the whip, they 
might have finished 120 holes in the course of the day ; barely 
completing it at the end of the day ; but if told that, if they did 
the same work, they might as soon as it was done go away, they 
would, by abridging their intervals of rest, finish it before three 
o'clock in the afternoon, beginning at five in the morning." — 
" The slaves will certainly do much more for themselves than 
when they work for their masters. Even when performing task- 
work, they are different beings. A negro will lift a load for himself 
which it would require a severe flogging to make him lift for his 
master. He had seen them travelling to market, groaning under 
a load of hard wood timber, which no overseer could make them 
can-y. But the inducement was great ; they were sure to get a 
high price for it, and they were laboring for themselves. He had 
often observed them, after working for their masters, and for their 
own maintenance, prolong their work to procure some little in- 
dulgences. Whenever they could contrive by task-work, or other 
arrangements, to obtain any extra time, their grounds were crowded 
with them, laboring for their own benefit. They cannot, therefore, 
bo said to be an indolent race, or incapable of being actuated by 
the motives by which labor is generally prompted." — "Certainly 
the desire for freedom does not arise from the slave's connecting it 
with an exemption from labor ; for they see under their own eyes 
many who had been slaves laboring hard for their support. Even 
an old negro on an estate, when he ceases to labor for his master, 
does not cease to labor for himself. There was one on the estate 
of Salt Savannah, who, though allowed to ' sit down and to be 
exempt from plantation labor, was most industrious and hard-work- 
ing for himself.' " 

The following is from the evidence of Captain "Williams, a pro- 
slavery witness. 

" He had affirmed the slaves to be naturally lazy ; but he admits 
that the West India markets are supplied, by the voluntary labor 
of the slaves, with poultry, pigs, provisions, and vegetables, which 
they brought from a considerable distance to the Sunday market, 
and for which they knew very well how to drive a baigain ; but 
all this industry, he added, was for themselves. And, being asked 
whether he knew w^ho would work without wages if not compelled, 
he said he did not know any." 
E 



74 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

Nor in tkis country can the slave always buy his free- 
dom, even if he have the pecuniary means. In some States 
it is almost impossible, so great are the obstructions 
placed in the way by the governments. Yet the force of 
the desire of freedom as a stimulus to industry is not un- 
knov/n here, and its influence, wherever the laws and 
custom do not discourage manumission, will not be denied. 
In the State of Ohio may be found many colored persons 
who have earned their own freedom, and who are now 
laboring to purchase that of their friends. Some of 
them have " paid six hundred, nine hundred, and even 
near fourteen hundred dollars for themselves individually, 

Mr. Scott, a witness on the same side, says, — " Many of them, 
even of the field negroes, by selUng provisions, pigs, and poultry, 
have a good deal of money. They all have pigs and poultry, and 
some have cattle. The possession of property unquestionably in- 
creases the diligence and industry of the slave." — " He admits, 
too, that the negro is industrious in his own grounds, and raises 
food for himself and family, and buys comforts, and luxuries, and 
finery, though compelled to work so many hours for his master ; 
yet now he has the advantage of being under control : if he were 
free it would be very different. — He is asked whether he thought 
that the desire of good food, and fine clothing, and the luxuries 
of life, or the love of money, supposing a man to have earned some 
as a slave, would cease the moment he became free, and had more 
time to indulge all these desires : he reluctantly, at length, admitted 
that it was not in nature that they should." 

Another witness on the same side, — " WilUam Watson, Esq., 
had been in the Caraccas from 1810 to 1814. Estates were then 
cultivated partly by slave labor and partly by free. The free 
worked with the slaves when they were wanted, which was chiefly 
in crop time. He had known m.any instances where slaves were 
mannered wholly by persons who had themselves been slaves. 
The managers of estates were mostly colored or black persons, 
who had been emancipated. This was common in the Vale of 
Chaldo, live or six miles from the town. He has had no connexion 
with the Caraccas since 1814. But while he was there, he thought 
the free blacks were generally employed in cultivation, and that 
they were a better sort of people than he had seen in our islands. 
Great confidence was placed in them. The whole system of Span- 
ish slavery is different from ours : it is much milder, and the con- 
sequence of this mildness is an improvement of character. He 
had no doubt at all that the blacks were, when well treated, sus- 
ceptible of the same motives which influence other men. The 
most powerful stimulus in the world to a man is laboring to gain 
his freedom. In Louisiana the planters say that they get a great 
deal more work when they put the slaves on task-work \ and, it 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 75 

or themselves and families." It is said, upon good au- 
thority, to be probable that one third of the adidt blacks 
of Cincinnati, having redeemed themselves, are em- 
ployed in redeeming their friends and relatives from 
slavery. In the late debate on the subject of emancipa- 
tion in Lane Seminary, Ohio, which has attracted some 
notice, one of the speakers, then a member of the school, 
had been a slave. " He was stolen from Africa when 
an infant, and sold into slavery. His master, who resided 
in Arkansas, died, leaving him to his widow. He was 
then about eighteen years of age. For some years, lie 
managed the plantation for his mistress. Finally, he 

the stimulus of freedom were generally tried, and men were allowed 
to free themselves by their exertions, they would be much more 
industrious, and would not cease to be so when free, though, in a 
country fsirnishing easily the comforts and conveniences of life, 
many might relax when free. He noticed the slaves after eman- 
cipation generally at work, raising provisions and other things. In 
his time the estates had slaves enough to keep the tields in order, 
except in crop time, when they called in free laborers. There was 
a very considerable free colored population in the Caraccas, who 
were in general very industrious. He had been in Mexico, but 
had never seen any slaves there. The great mass of the popula- 
tion are a mixed race, and those of the African were deemed as 
industrious as the rest. They were not more degraded, or more 
idle, than the others." 

The last witness I shall cite, Mr. Wildman, was on the same 
side also. His treatment of his slaves had been peculiar. The 
use of the whip, as a stimulus to labor, having been wholly abol- 
ished on his estates. He says, — " He has had the most gratifying 
proofs of the gratitude of his slaves in tiieir exertions by labor to 
bring up his estates from the low state to which they had fallen. 
The slaves on Salt Savannah voluntarily offered to give up their 
own time to repair the waste on that estate. When Mr. Farquar- 
son, his present attorney and friend, took possession, the negroes 
came to him in a body, and said they were ashamed and hurt he 
should see its condition ; and at night theT' came to him again in 
a body, to say that they would give up their whole time till the 
estate was put in order again ; and since that time the work has 
been carried on to Mr. Farquarson's entire satisfaction." — "He 
has known negroes to carry loads to market which they could not 
be induced, even by force, to carry for their master; but it was 
voluntarily done for' their own benefit: and, in point of fact, it is 
true that the negroes do exert themselves, with great energy, 
for the purpo-^e of obtaining, not only food, but comforts and luxu- 
ries. — Mr. Wildman admitted that' if the slaves, who had now 
only 26 days in the year during which to provide for themselves 



76 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

purchased his time by the year, and began to earn money 
to buy his freedom. After five years of toil, having paid 
his owners $ 055, besides supporting himself during the 
time, he received his ' free papers,' and emigrated to a 
free State with more than $200 in his pocket. Every 
cent of this money, $855, he earned by labor and trad- 
ing." (H. B. Stanton's Letter to the N. York Evangelist.) 

The important influence which the chance of procuring 
their freedom may have on the industry of the slaves, is 
strongly shown in Cuba, where the practice of manu- 
mission is more frequent than in any country where 
slavery prevails. 

Superior mildness and equity have always been charac- 
teristic of Spanish and Portuguese slavery, and their 
whole treatment of the negroes in the colonies. The 
good effects are seen in the greater fidelity and industry 
of the slaves, and in the number, quietness, and useful- 
ness of the free blacks. 

The slaves are always allowed to labor for their own 
benefit, and, when they have earned their price, which 

and tbeir families, occupied themselves diligently in their own 
grounds, they w^ould do so, supposing the number to be increased 
to 35, or any larger number; nor did he believe that there was any 
limit to which it might not be extended with advantage, and even 
with increased energy on their parts, with a view to the acquisition 
of wealth; and especially if their moral habits were improved by 
religious instruction. Of this he was so well persuaded, that he 
should not feel the least disinclination, in the course of a few 
years, that government should proclaim freedom to all slaves." 

The Committee of the House of Lords on the same subject, 
contained a greater number decidedly opposed to emancipation 
than decidedly in its favor, yet there was nothing elicited by them 
to counterbalance the weight of evidence on the side of the aboli- 
tionists. The result of ttie reports of these committees, and the 
deliberations of ParlianSent thereon, was an act for the immediate 
emancipation of all who were in slavery. On the 1st of August, 
1834, a day now past, and which will be among not the least 
memorable in history, every slave in the British Colonies was " ab- 
solutely and for ever manumitted." Yet even now we are told 
that this immediate emancipation is a scheme, " the very idea of 
which curdles the blood of every judicious friend of humanity." — 
(N. A. Review, July, 1834.) Alas for your fame as philanthropists 
and statesmen, — Clarkson and Buxton, Wilberforce and Macaulay, 
Brougham and Stanley, if such is the measure you so ardently 
longed for, so zealously urged, so ably defended ! 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 77 

may be fixed by a magistrate, to claim their freedom of 
their masters. There are no obstacles placed in the way 
of slaves being taught; but, on the contrary, this is al- 
ways favored, as every thing is, which shall tend to ele- 
vate the slave, and enable him to procure his freedom. 

In these facts, and in this, that the cultivation of the 
cane and other articles is in part carried on by free 
blacks, may be found some explanation of the great pro- 
ductiveness of the island, and cheapness of its sugar. 
Indeed so near does the labor of the slaves of Cuba ap- 
proach the voluntary industry of freemen, that it has 
been said, and is probably true, that the total extinction 
of slavery there at once, by a simple decree to that pur- 
pose from the government, might be effected without the 
least confusion, and with but slight change in the relation 
of the cultivators to the proprietors. 

The system of working slaves, which has been found 
most profitable in all parts of the world, and which we 
know is practised in many parts of the slaveholding 
States of the Union, itself affords evidence of the fitness 
of the blacks for free labor, and their susceptibility to the 
stimulus of reward. It is that of task-work, as it is called, 
and consists in giving to the slave a certain amount of 
labor, which being finished, he is free from labor for the 
rest of the day. Of the advantages of this system, over 
that of driving, we have the surest testimony. " The 
keen-sighted spirit of a necessary avarice," we are told 
by Mr. Brougham, in his Colonial Policy, " has taught 
the Dutch planter of Guiana to view the general intro- 
duction of task-work as the most profitable manner of 
working his slaves." Admiral Fleming stated that task- 
work prevailed on the sugar estates in Cuba, and also 
in the Caraccas.* 

* William Taylor, Esq. was asked by the Committee of the House 
of Commons if it was not the fact, " that by means of giving them 
wages, you would get from them the greatest quantity of work that 
their physical strength was able to perform ? — Certainly ; I found 
that by giving them task- work, and then by paying them for extra 
work, I got much more work done, and it was cheerfully done." 

Mr. Scott was asked, — "Were you in the habit of employing 
any of your slaves upon task-work ? — Sometimes ; in digging cane- 
holes, for instance, the overseer would give them task-work. 
e2 



78 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

What yet more strikingly supports the position I wish 
to establish, is the fact that employing slaves as free 
laborers, that is, for wages, has in many instances been 
adopted with great advantage to the proprietors. 

Admiral Fleming stated before the Committee of the 
House of Commons that the Marquis del Toro, a relative 
of Bolivar's, who owned immense estates in the Caraccas, 

" Have you found that they performed that task-work with 
greater expedition than they would do the same quantity of work 
at day labor ? — Certainly ; they generally finished the task- work 
by two o'clock in the afternoon, by working at their dinner time. 

" To what did they betake themselves after that during the rest 
of the day ? — They often went to their grounds or to their gar- 
dens. 

" Did it ever happen to you upon any estate, to offer the negroes 
any small compensation for additional labor .' — I dare say it has, 
though I cannot call any instance to my recollection at this moment ; 
I know that negroes are frequently paid for their extra labor. 

" Do not they work wilhngly then ? — Certainly they do." 

The following statements occur in the evidence before the Lords' 
Committee. 

Mr. Edm. Sharp. — " Have you ever worked the negroes under 
your care at task- work ? — Frequently. 

" Have you worked them on cane-hole-digging ? — Cane-hole- 
digging is generally by task- work, where we can get it done ; he 
does his day's work, and is at liberty to go where he pleases after- 
wards. 

" Have you ever done it in clearing of canes .' — That is work 
of that nature that we can scarcely give task-work in it. 

" Have you given any other description of work ? — Various 
other works in the trades ; stone-wall building, and the cooperage. 

" When you have put the slaves to task-work in respect to cane- 
hole-digging, have you not found that they have done the work at 
an early time in the day, so as to be able to get a portion of the 
remainder ? — Yes, they have done their task- work by two or three 
o'clock ; then they would work the two hours at noon to get that. 

" What reason can you assign for his performing the task-work 
so expeditiously as to be enabled to get the remainder of the day .' 
— Knowing there is a boon to him for the remainder of the day, of 
course he works harder." 

' Testimony to the superior diligence of slaves engaged in task- 
work, and to their readiness to work for themselves in the hours 
thus gained, is in like manner borne by the most intelligent and 
experienced planters of our own countrj-. They will all say, how- 
ever, with Mr. Scott, that the industry of the negro ceases upon 
his emancipation. What a sin2;uiur race of beings these blacks 
must be ! So long as their condition essentially forbids their holding 
property, they will work late and early for it. Tell them their 
rights are as sacred as the white man's, and all desire vanishes. 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 79 

worked all his slaves by free labor as the most profitable 
method. 

Mr. Telfair, a planter in the Mauritius, a decided op- 
ponent of the English Anti-Slavery Society, in " An 
Account of the State of Slavery at Mauritius," says, " It 
is easy to perceive that the fear of chastisement, hitherto 
considered almost the only motive of a black's exertion, 
is little calculated to call forth all the industry he is 
capable of exerting. Fear engages him to conceal, rather 
than to show the extent of his corporeal powers ; and 
all the labor he can elude, is by him considered positive 
gain." In another place he says, " The adoption of 
tasks, whenever practicable, augmented the amount of 
work performed, and simplified the duties of the overseer, 
who had only to see that the task was done in a work- 
man-like manner. Many of the more handy negroes 
could perform their portion before four o'clock, and some 
even before two, P.M." — "The only certain means," 
continues Mr. Telfair, *' by which a master can influence 
the conduct of his servants, are punishments and rewards. 
Experience confirmed my anticipation of the superiority 
of the latter ; and, in this view, every thing we could 
imagine was done to excite the emulation of the blacks, 
particularly by public trials of skill in ploughing, reap- 
ing, mowing, sowing, &lc. And we were satisfied that 
the greatest ardor and energy were produced by the 
system of remuneration. A man, actuated by the hope 
of reward, labors cheerfully, and finds that he possesses 
powers of which he was not before aware." 

" If," says Mr. Conder, the writer already quoted, 
" even the voluntary exertion of a slave is found thus to 
exceed the utmost sum of involuntary labor, that can be 
extorted from him in the same time by means of the 
driving system, how much more eflicient must be the 
voluntary labor of a free man ! Could a stronger proof 
be given of the paralyzing influence of slavery on human 
exertion, than the beneficial results that have followed 
this slight modification of the system, by which the will 
of the laborer is found to perform in ten hours, what the 
whip could not accomplish in twelve ? If the mere 
prospect of getting through his task sooner, is thus sufl^- 
e3 



80 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

cient to stimulate the physical powers of the slave to a 
greater exertion than he would otherwise be capable of 
putting forth, (for there is a strength imparted by such 
a stimulant,) what reason can we have to suppose that 
the hope of remuneration would be less effective in stimu- 
lating the free laborer ? If task-work thus increases the 
productiveness of slave labor, because it relaxes the 
manacles which fetter the will and energies of the laborer, 
how much more would the voluntary labor of the free- 
man accomplish, under the higher stimulation of self- 
interest, and with the prospect of personal gain ! " 

Mr. Wildman, and other of the pro-slavery witnesses 
before the House of Commons, who testified strongly and 
decidedly to the readiness of the slaves to work for hire, 
and their superior industry while doing so, still declared, 
they could not believe this would continue after they 
were emancipated. A similar notion is very commonly 
entertained among us. 

So far as we know the character of the slaves in the 
United States, however, we have no reason to doubt 
that as slaves they would here, as elsewhere, accomplish 
more work, when actuated by the hope of reward, than 
they will under any compulsory system whatever. I 
would venture to refer this to any candid and benevo- 
lent slaveholder. Surely those who affirm the com- 
fortable condition of the slaves in the United States, 
and who say, that, compared with that of many of the 
laboring classes of Europe, it will not be found infe- 
rior, mean to include in the word comfort the extent 
and variety of their wants, as well as the certainty of 
their gratification. Nor will they readily allow any 
superiority in character and condition to the slaves of 
Jamaica, of Cuba, or the Mauritius. Yet those who assert 
the necessity of slavery in this country must do this, or 
place themselves in the same predicament with the recent 
advocates of slavery in Great Britain. Acknowledging 
with them that the slaves are accustomed to order and 
obedience, and are easily managed ; (see note to p. 71st, 
and the evidence before Parliamentary Committees, pas- 
sim;) that they have the habits of civilized life, and the 
wants which grow out of them ; that they are indeed 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 81 

peculiarly fond of the comforts which belong to an ad- 
vanced state of society, and are now in the practice of 
employing a portion at least of their leisure hours, if they 
have any, in working for themselves, and at such times 
show a capacity and industry never witnessed under 
the overseer, they must hold that all this desire of bet- 
tering their condition will cease upon emancipation. 
While they admit that no power on earth can force them 
to do, what the certainty of reward will, they must 
maintain that the hope of reward will do nothing, unless 
backed by the fear of punishment. The fear of starva- 
tion will of course keep them from utter slothfulness, for 
this is a law of the animal nature ; but although they now 
feel wants, beyond the body's cravings for bare suste- 
nance, and are impelled thereby to voluntary and even 
strenuous exertion, all this belongs to their enslaved con- 
dition. They must believe that opening to them a wider 
field of industry, and offering a stronger motive of that 
very kind which is now found most effective, making 
its rewards more secure, and giving them instruction 
which shall increase their powers, will only check the 
desires now strong within them ; though it is the lesson 
of universal experience, that men's desires keep pace 
with their acquisitions, and that the thirst of gain is 
never sated. They must come in fine to the prepos- 
terous notion advanced by Mr. Scott of Jamaica, that 
" man is more industrious in a state of slavery, than 
in a state of freedom," and maintain that the black 
cannot be hired to be diligent, till he is first made a 
bondsman, and learns the value of property by being 
priced himself 

In this mode of reasoning, the original ground of 
objection to the abolition of negro slavery is lost sight 
of, and indeed wholly abandoned. This was, that the 
negroes were as yet wholly uncivilized, unwonted to the 
customs, and unconscious of the wants of men in an 
artificial state of society. They could not become at 
once free laborers, it was said, because they had not the 
desires or necessities to which we appeal, and on which 
we rely to obtain the labor of civdizcd freemen for 
hire. They not only lacked foresight, but their wants 
e4 



82 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

were too few and too easily supplied to suppose, that they 
would be induced by any thing, but the whip, to toil all 
day beneath a tropical sun. Had this been true when 
the question of negro emancipation was first agitated 
forty years ago, when a vast proportion of the slaves were 
imported Africans, and there existed among the mass but 
slight attachment to soils which they had known only in 
their bondage, — the case is altered now, when the title 
of Africans is no longer their true one, when the land 
they inhabit is their native land, and they have acquired 
a taste for those comforts, which, though luxuries un- 
cared for by the barbarian, are necessaries to the meanest 
individuals in a civilized community. Ignorant, dull, 
and disposed to sloth and sensuality though the negro 
slaves may be, the epithet of savages does not belong to 
them. Though they may be the lowest in the scale of 
.civilized man, and even inferior to some barbarians 
in quickness of mind and practical knowledge, they 
are nevertheless accustomed to regular labor, to quiet 
submission to constituted authorities, they have seen, 
though rarely to enjoy, the benefits of industry, and are 
aware that the wealth and enjoyments of their master 
result from their steady exertions, regulated by his skill, 
and combined by his foresight and superior knowledge. 
They have seen in their master's condition the advantages 
of established laws, securing to him his rights, protecting 
his property, and punishing by fixed penalties all breaches 
of good order. Even in their own deprivations they see ad- 
vantages secured to others by concert and unity of action. 
Their labor is called compulsory, and such it is, some- 
times literally, being constantly urged by the lash, but 
as often, much oftener I am willing to believe, because 
there is a power which can drive them to work if they 
are refractory. It is the consciousness that there is such 
a power, rather than the constant application of it, which 
keeps them at labor. They are sensible that it is for their 
interest to work without resistance, though many will 
avoid it when possible. They are thoroughly broken in, 
in short, and feel that it is better for them to take their 
share of the load not only rather than be flogged, bat 
rather than be turned adrift upon the wild savannah. 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 83 

It has often been urged as an argument for slavery, that 
slaves when offered their freedom have sometimes refused 
it. Those who so use this argument, however, must 
never say that negroes will not labor from choice, and it 
is nothing else than absurd to say, as some have done, 
that *' negroes would never accept their freedom on the 
condition of working for their living," for it is with no 
other condition than this, that they can take slavery in- 
stead. The choice itself shows that those slaves are 
sensible of the necessity and the advantages of steady 
labor. It is nothing else than the choice of constant and 
wonted occupation under a familiar and kind master, 
with the assurance of support, (and under no other cir- 
cumstances will manumission ever be rejected,) to un- 
certain employment and more uncertain remuneration. 
The moral evils of their situation, the moral conse- 
quences of their choice they are not aware of. Look- 
ing merely at the physical condition, and beyond 
this no slaves will ever look, there is no doubt that 
some of them are better off than some of their free 
brethren. It is well to understand the idea slaves have 
of liberty when they reject it. " Timothy," said Mr. 
Dignum, one of the pro-slavery witnesses before the Par- 
liamentary Committees, to a negro in Jamaica, '' suppose 
your master says he will give you free to-morrow, — but 
this is not your land, — you must go and work for any 
body who will take you, and he must get somebody else 
and give him your house You may go away, Timothy, 
but when you get on the road you will be hungry and 
have nothing to eat. If you beg you will be turned 
away, you know the negroes don't like to see the free 
people coming to their place to get food. Now your 
master takes good care of you, if you work for him, and 
you have a comfortable house according to your beha- 
viour." Timothy was a sensible fellow ; and believing 
Mr. Dignum, and being head driver, and possessing 
many privileges withal, no wonder replied, " Massa, I 
no care for free." He preferred labor in the condition 
of a favored bondsman, with the certain recompense of 
food and shelter, to a liberty w^hich implied merely idle- 
ness and starvation. I would not aronip for libertv offered 



84 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR, 

on such conditions, which are as unnecessary as they are 
impolitic and cruel. 

Is it not plain, that slaves who make a similar choice 
do not, at all times, prefer idleness to exertion, and 
that they are able to conceive of pleasure purchased by 
toil ? Is it right, then, to say that men, who can prefer 
slavery and labor to liberty and idleness, desire emanci- 
pation only for the indulgence of sloth, and will not, 
when freed from coercion, labor, if employment is offered, 
for the recompense which tempted them to be slaves ? 

The extent to which slaves can be left to themselves, 
and their conduct when so left, most satisfactorily show 
the advance made by them in the arts of civilization, and 
at what remove they now are from any thing that can 
be called a savage state. One instance of a plantation 
being managed by a slave has already been alluded to, 
(supra, p. 75.) I will now relate another as it was re- 
lated to me by a New England gentleman, a practical 
agriculturist, on whose testimony the most perfect reli- 
ance may be placed, and who, during rather more than 
a year spent in Mississippi, gave great attention to the 
mode of managing the cotton estates. While he was 
there, a planter in his neighbourhood was trying the ex- 
periment of leaving the negroes entirely to themselves. 
He did not reside upon his plantation, but at a distance 
of fifteen miles. There was no white upon it. He told 
his people that if they would engage to be industrious 
and give him good crops, he would not place any over- 
seer above them. If he found they failed, he should 
send one. The only article raised on the plantation was 
cotton. The meat and even the bread-corn was bought for 
them. The master of course attended to the purchases 
and sales, and exercised a general supervision, visiting 
the estate three or four times a month. The slaves had 
managers chosen from their own number. The result 
for one year, the duration of his trial at that time, was in 
favor of the plan. The proprietor said that his crops 
were not quite as large as under the old system, but as 
he paid no overseer's salary, he thought that he made a 
saving in money, and what deserves remark, in trouble 
also. He meant to persevere in the system so long as 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 85 

it continued to work as well as it had done. In this 
case the only motive to industry, beside habit and a re- 
gard for their master's interest, was the desire of being 
saved from a white overseer. Even this slight deviation 
from the common slave system was found to be a saving 
of expense and trouble to the master. The operation of 
a reward in proportion to their industry, or to the size of 
the crops, was not tried. Had this stimulus been offered, 
can there be any doubt the slaves would have worked 
better ? It is inconceivable that they should not. The 
statements of the West India witnesses make it impossible 
to doubt it. They would have felt then that they were 
really working for themselves ; they would have given 
their hearts and minds to their labor, and the effect would 
have been perceived in the superior productiveness of 
the estate. 

This case is probably not a solitary nor a very peculiar 
one. On very many of the large plantations negroes are 
left to conduct their own labors for days together ; visited 
only occasionally by an overseer, who of course directs 
the general operations of the gangs. On many separate 
plantations there are no whites residing, though the 
slaves have an overseer to attend to them occasionally. 
The people there set themselves at work, and keep at 
work from habit, and a general notion that it is at once 
necessary and best for them to do so. Their condition 
as laborers differs from that of free laborers in that they 
have no choice as to their employment, nor any direct 
interest in exerting their powers to their full extent ; but 
on the contrary, their only attainable good being rest, 
their tendency is always to seek it, and to conceal rather 
than to display their capabilities. Such instances de- 
serve our attention on several accounts.* 



* To the same class of instances belong those of slaves who are 
allowed by their masters to seek employment for themselves at 
wages, bringing to them a proportion of what they earn, or perhaps 
a tixed sum per month, being allowed to keep the remainder. 
This is practised, according to Mr. Hodgson, in South Carolina and 
Georgia. In the latter State, however, the master who allows a 
slave to hire himself out to another for his own benefit is liable to 
a fine, " for every weekly offence on the part of the master, un- 
less the labor is done on his own premises." (See Stroud, p. 47.) 



86 FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 

Is it conceivable that in any state of freedom, such 
as is enjoyed by any men in civihzed society, the ne- 
groes should possess better opportunities for combina- 
tion and rebellion, than under the circumstances just 
mentioned 1 If their first thought is ever to escape from 
labor, and they are always disposed to desert the planta- 
tions on the first opportunity, would they have continued 
faithful to the master under such liberty as was here 
given them, and for so slight a recompense 1 What kept 
them at work ? Why did they not all betake themselves to 
the cane-brake ? Two considerations probably restrained 
them. One, that there was a remote power which possi- 
bly might compel their return, and another more weighty, 
that it was for their interest, under existing circum- 
stances, independently of every thing else, to remain steady 
at their occupations. If they were restrained by the 
first consideration, the only tolerable plea that can be 
offered for the perpetuation of that private despotism, 
which is the essence of slavery, is no longer available. 
If the sense of an unseen power which can bring them 
back to their tasks is sufficient to keep slaves from va- 
grancy, and the presence of an overseer with his whip in 
hand, to anticipate the tardy operation of the law, is not 
all-important, then why may not the restraints of the law 
alone be relied on ? You may, if you please, appoint a 
supervisor and guardian to every body of an hundred negro 
laborers, with power to prohibit roving and to punish 
negligence in the few who shall be found too lazy or too 
vicious to support themselves by voluntary industry. 
The expediency of some such measure need not be 
denied, though it is perhaps debatable, but it is at any 
rate a very different thing from slavery. It in fact will 
not differ in principle from the compulsion of labor that 

There are similar provisions in other States. Speaking of this 
practice of allowing slaves to hire themselves out, Mr. H. adds, 
" Surely no one will contend that a man who is capable of taking 
care of his family, while compelled to pay his owner a premium 
for permission to do so, will become less competent to manage his 
concerns, when exonerated from that tax, or that he will relax his 
efforts, when a stranger no longer divides with him the fruits of 
his toil." (Hodgson's Travels in America, Vol. I. p. 112.) 



FITNESS OF THE BLACKS FOR FREE LABOR. 87 

is practised in every New England workhouse. None 
need subject themselves to it, who will labor without ; 
and, moreover, the coercive power is a responsible 
one. 

If they were restrained by the first consideration, as 
doubtless the majority were, it may be asked, Will it be 
less for the slaves' interest to continue at work, when, 
beside bare food and clothing, they shall be receiving 
either in the shape of money, or of a share of the pro- 
ducts of the soil, remuneration in proportion to their 
industry 1 Or when no longer kept in servile ignorance, 
education though of the simplest sort is given to them, 
will they be less capable than now of discerning what is 
their real good 1 No, the negro slaves now feel that 
labor is requisite, that their master may have the means 
of providing sustenance for them and their families. 
And they will not regard this labor as less requisite, when 
the duty of this provision devolves upon themselves, nor 
will it be performed more reluctantly. 

If there is one thing settled in the whole range of this 
subject, it is that the milder the management of the slaves, 
and the more the system of working them approaches to 
the free labor system ; in other words, the less the reliance 
placed on compulsion, and the greater the employment of 
the stimulus of reward, the greater will be the amount of 
work procured, and the greater the master's profits. We 
must either entirely reject the evidence which meets us 
on every hand, and wholly discredit the testimony of the 
numerous and competent witnesses who have above been 
cited, or we must believe this. The necessity of appeal- 
ing to the terror of the lash, in the management of slaves, 
may be reduced ad iiijinitiim, and this not slowly and 
by degrees, but at once and universally. When it is 
done totally and universally, to talk of fears about the 
consequences of emancipation will be childish. If the 
whip, then, even as an " emblem of authority," which is 
all some of the good West India slavery advocates chose 
to consider it, can be safely abandoned, and wages be 
adopted with negro slaves instead, why not abandon also 
this last hateful title, and tell the blacks at once they 
are no longer " chattels personal." 



88 CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. 

If negro slaves work best for hire, and people of color 
already free are as willing and efficient laborers as free 
white men, it certainly requires some new and unknown 
condition to be worked into the problem, to prove, that, in 
the change from slaves to freemen, they cannot be got to 
labor either for " love or money." 

I have already gone beyond the limits I had prescribed 
to my pen, yet there remains much that ought to be 
said. I shall proceed now to give a brief account of some 
instances of emancipation, which confirm in the strongest 
manner the position I have desired to establish, with re- 
gard to the industry of the slave and the profits of the 
master. I wish to show also that the possibility of the 
application of free labor to the raising of tropical produce 
is not a subject of conjecture. 

It has been said, that " there is no instance of the 
successful cultivation of the sugar-cane by free labor." 
(Amer. duart. Review, No. 23, p. 261.) If it be shown 
that sugar can be cultivated with advantage by free labor, 
there certainly appears no reason why cotton, rice, and 
coffee should not be. In fact it is well known that all 
are so cultivated in various parts of the world. 

In the inquiry respecting the cane, we are at the outset 
met with the broad fact, that " all the sugar cultivated 
in India, the original country of the cane, is cultivated 
by free labor. It is also notorious, that the sugar grown 
by slave labor cannot compete in cheapness with that 
which is grown by free labor in the East Indies. At- 
tempts have been made to escape from the conclusive 
force of this fact, by representing the East India sugar 
to be the produce of slave labor ; but this representation 
is utterly devoid of the semblance of truth. Whatever 
may be the condition of the servile classes on the coast 
of Malabar, where no sugar is grown, the agriculture of 
the Bengal provinces, which supply the whole of the 
sugar exported from India, is entirely conducted by free 
labor."* 



* The following extracts from a Minute of the Bengal Board of 
Trade, Aug. 7, 1792, quoted by Mr. Conder, in his work already 
cited, will settle this question. 



CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. 89 

" Mr. Crawfurd, in his History of the Indian Archipe- 
lago, has given a long account of the husbandry of the 
sugar-cane, and furnishes an estimate of its comparative 
market value. He says, 

" Edwards has estimated the price of growing sugar 



" In this country (Bengal) the cultivator is either the imme- 
diate proprietor of the ground, or he hires it, as in Europe, of the 
proprietor, and uses his discretion in cultivating what he thinks 
best adapted to the nature of the soil or the demand of the market. 
One field produces sugar ; the next, wheat, rice, or cotton. The 
husbandman is nourished and clothed from his own ground ; or, if 
he thinks it more for his interest to sell the whole of his produce, 
supplies himself and family with the necessaries of life from his 
neighbour, or from the next public market." — "The Bengal 
peasantry are freemen, and are, in the usual course of nature, re- 
placed by their children." — " The Bengal peasant is actuated by 
the ordinary w^ants and desires of mankind. His family assist his 
labor, and soothe his toil, and the sharp eye of personal interest 
guides his judgment." 

A gentleman who had been engaged in the cultivation of sugar 
in Jamaica for 15 years, William Fitzmaurice, Esq., in a letter ad- 
dressed to the Directors of the East India Company, dated Calcutta, 
1793, says, " that even the West India planters might import them 
(sugars) from hence on much easier terms than they can afford to 
sell sugars in the curing houses on the plantations." 

Mr.Botham, a witness before a " Committee of the Lords of the 
Council," 1789, says, that the cultivation of the cane is carried on 
in China, Bengal, the coast of Malabar, and above all near Batavia 
by free labor, and that sugar of a superior quality and an inferior 
price to the West India sugar is there produced. Near Batavia 
sugar is cultivated by free Chinese husbandmen and manufac- 
turers in a superior manner. From his own experience, Mr. B. 
declares that " the sugar estates can be worked cheaper by free 
persons than by slaves." " Mr. Botham for some time conducted 
some sugar-w^orks at Bencoolen- by free laborers. Marsden, in his 
History "of Sumatra, highly commends his management, and states 
that the expenses, particularly of the slaves, had frustrated many 
former attempts of the English to cultivate the sugar-cane profitably 
at that place." He had previously spent two years in the West 
Indies. 

See also a paper in the Appendix to the Report of the Committee 
of the House of Commons, containing the evidence of a native of 
Madras settled in the Mauritius, given to Messrs. Colebrook and 
Blair, Commissioners of Enquiry into the means of improving the 
British Eastern Colonies. He stated his conviction and the grounds 
of it, that sugar could be raised more cheaply by free la1)or in 
Bengal than by slave labor in the Mauritius. — See also Sir Stam- 
ford Raffle's work on Java. 



90 CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. 

in Jamaica at 18s. 9c?. per cwt. By the estimate I have 
furnished, this is 125 per cent, dearer than Java sugar." 

Brougham, in his Colonial Policy, speaking of the cul- 
ture of sugar in Egypt by freemen, says that we may 
know how cheaply the produce will be raised, from the 
prices of Asiatic sugars which are raised entirely by 
free hands. " In Cochin, the great sugar market of the 
south of Asia, the finest sugar is sold for less than a 
penny a pound." 

The most important instance, however, in connexion 
with our present subject, is that related in a despatch of 
Mr. Ward, late British Envoy to Mexico, to Mr. Canning, 
dated March 13, 1826. He says, " The possibility of 
introducing a system of free labor into the West India 
Islands having been so much discussed in England, I 
conceived that it might not be uninteresting to His Ma- 
jesty's Government to receive some details respecting the 
result of the experiment in this country, where it cer- 
tainly has had a fair trial. I accordingly took advantage 
of Mr. Morier's prolonged stay here to visit the Valley of 
Cuernavaca, and Cuantla Amilpas, which supplies a great 
part of the federation with sugar and coffee, although not 
a single slave is at present employed in their cultivation. 
I have the honor to inclose a sketch of the observations 
which I was enabled to make upon this journey, together 
with such details as I have thought best calculated to 
show both the scale upon which these estates are worked, 
and the complete success with which the abolition of 
slavery has, in this instance, been attended." — " It is 
believed that the sugar-cane was first planted there about 
one hundred years ago ; from that time the number of 
sugar-estates has gone on increasing, until there is now 
hardly an acre of ground on the whole plain which is not 
turned to account. The cultivation was originally car- 
ried on entirely by slaves, who were purchased at Vera 
Cruz, at from 300 to 400 dollars each. It was found, 
however, that this system was attended with considerable 
inconvenience, it being impossible to secure a sufficient 
supply of slaves during a war." — " Several of the great 
proprietors were induced by these circumstances to give 
libertv to a certain number of their slaves annuallv, and 



CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. 91 

by encouraging marriages between them and the Indians 
of the country, to propagate a race of free laborers, who 
might be employed when a supply of slaves was no longer 
to be obtained. This plan proved so eminently success- 
ful, that on some of the largest estates there was not a 
single slave in the year 1808. The policy of the measure 
became still more apparent on the breaking out of the 
revolution in 1810. The planters who had not adopted 
the system of gradual emancipation before that period 
saw themselves abandoned, and were forced, in many 
instances, to give up working their estates, as their slaves 
took advantage of the approach of the insurgents to join 
them en masse ; while those who had provided them- 
selves with a mixed cast of free laborers, retained, even 
during the worst times, a sufficient number of men to 
enable them to continue to cultivate their lands, although 
upon a smaller scale." — " The scale upon which these 
estates are worked is enormous." 

The seven largest estates in Cuernavaca produced each 
annually about 30,000 arrobas, of 25 lb. each, of sugar. 
*' The crops are usually most abundant, the cane being 
planted much thicker than is customary in Jamaica, and 
the machinery, in the opinion of Dr. Wilson, who ac- 
companied me, and who has been much in the West 
India Islands, is fully equal to any used in the British 
colonies. The number of workmen generally employed 
upon an estate capable of producing 40,000 arrobas of 
sugar amounts to 150, with occasional additions when 
the season is late, or the work has been retarded by any 
accidental cause. The laborers are mostly paid by the 
piece, and many of them can earn, if industrious, from 
six to seven rials per diem, (about three quarters of a 
dollar.) Fifty men are employed in watering the canes, 
twenty in cutting, ten in bringing the cut canes from the 
field, (each with six mules,) twenty-five (mostly boys) in 
separating the green tops, which they use for fodder, and 
binding up the remainder for the muleteers. Twenty 
men, divided into gangs of four each, in feeding the 
engine day and night ; fourteen attend the boilers ; tuelve 
keep up the fires ; four turn the cane in the sun, after 
the juice has been expressed, and dry it for fuel ; and 



92 CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. 

ten are constantly at work in the warehouse clarifying 
the sugar, and removing it afterwards to the general 
store-room, from whence it is sent to the market," — 
" The arroba of 25 lbs. sells in Mexico for about three 
dollars, or two dollars and a half, if not of the best quality. 
The great Haciendas expend in wages to the workmen, 
and other current charges, from 800 to 1200 dollars a 
week. It often happens, however, that in a good year 
the sale of the molasses alone is sufficient to defray this 
expense, so that the sugar remains a clear profit. For 
every arroba of sugar an equal quantity of molasses is 
produced, which sells, at the door of the Hacienda, for 
five rials and a half the arroba." 

In Cuantla, some of the Haciendas are even larger 
than those above mentioned. Some also " are not only 
sugar but coffee estates." 

Mr. Ward concludes, " The most remarkable circum- 
stance, however, is the total abolition of slavery in a 
district where such a mass of colonial fruits is produced, 
and the success with which the introduction of free labor 
has been attended ; it is this which has induced me to 
lay these observations before His Majesty's Government, 
and to hope that they may be esteemed not wholly un- 
worthy of its attention." 

We can hardly desire more unequivocal evidence of 
the advantage of employing free labor in the cultivation 
of sugar, than is afforded by this account of Mr. Ward. 
A detailed comparison of the sugar culture of Mexico 
and of Cuba and Louisiana will be found in the note 
below.* 



* In his work on Mexico, published after his return, Mr. Ward 
states the produce of a hectare (two acres and a half) of land in 
the province of Vera Cruz to he 240 arrobas, or 6,000 lbs., over 
2,000 lbs, to the acre. This he says is double the produce of Cuba, 
(p. 62.) In Louisiana, according to a Report of the Agricultural 
Society of Baton Rouge, 1829, the produce is 1,000 lbs. to the acre. 
But even this estimate is large, for in 1830 another Report states 
that they " were deceived by the abundant and extraordinary crop 
of the preceding year, 1828." (Amer. Almanac, 1832, pp. 241-2.) 

In the Island of Cuba, Mr. Ward states that 150 slaves are re- 
quired to raise 16,000 arroba?, or 400,000 lbs. In Cuantla, which 
is inferior in fertility to the province of Vera Cruz, 150 free laborers 



' CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. ^3 

Nor is the testimony which it aiTords as to the possibil- 
ity of converting slave into free labor, and of emancipated 
Africans and their descendants becoming industrious and 
profitable hired servants less decisive. And I am un- 
able to conceive of any reason why a plan which proved 
so easily successful in Mexico, cannot be practised with 
the same ease and advantage in any part of the United 
States. 

*' In a paper, printed by order of the House of Com- 
mons, on the 14th of June, 1827, there is given the 
testimony of Robert Mitchell, Esq., a planter of Trin- 
idad, of nearly thirty years standing, and who was also 
the civil superintendant of a considerable body of free 
blacks settled in that island. The account he gives of 
them is, that each of these emancipated slaves possessed 
an allotment of land of his own, which he cultivated, and 
on which he raised provisions and other articles for him- 
self and his family, his wife and children aiding him in 
the work. A great part, however, of the time of the 
men (the women attending to the domestic menage) was 
freely given to laboring on the neighbouring plantations, 
on which they worked, not in general by the day, but by 
the piece." 

The work usually performed by them on the sugar 
estates was that of planting canes and cutting them for 
the mill. If this part of the business of sugar culture is 
performed by emancipated slaves for hire, it is not easy 
to perceive why the other parts of the culture should not 
be performed in like manner. 

Admiral Fleming stated that in Cuba free blacks were 
sometimes employed upon the sugar estates ; and it is 
beyond dispute that sugar is cultivated with profit by the 



produce from ,32,000 to 40,000 arrobas, say 900,000 lbs., at a medium, 
more than double the quantity. 

In Louisiana, accordina; to the authority above cited, 80 hands 
produce 400,000, which gives 5,000 lbs to the hand, and this esti- 
mate, we have seen, is large. The produce of each hand in 
Cuantla, according fo the above average estimate, is 6,000, by the 
largest estimate, 6,666. Mr. Ward says, that the amount received 
from the sale of the molasses alone is, in some years, sufficient to 
defray the whole expense for wages, &c., leaving only wear and tear 
of machinery to come out of the .sugar. 



94 CULTIVATION OF SUGAR BY FREE LABOR. 

hired labor of free people of color in Colombia, and to 
a moderate extent in Hayti. 

The Rev. W. Austin testified before the House of 
Commons' Committee, that " he had seen in Guiana ibur 
instances of bodies of slaves being emancipated, and land 
given to them on which they not only raised provisions, 
but also canes, which were manufactured into sugar at 
the master's mill for half the produce." 

This witness had spent 14 years in the West Indies, 
and had large reversionary interests in Guiana and Bar- 
badoes. His interests were in slaves more than in land. 
Yet so strong was his conviction that the value of West 
India property would be improved and not injured by 
emancipation, that he earnestly desired it. As for the 
danger of emancipation, he should not hesitate to return 
to the West Indies if slavery were abolished, but other- 
wise nothing would tempt him to do so. 

" There are in Surinam two settlements of emanci- 
pated slaves, with which he had had much intercourse. 
Their employment was to cut and saw timber into planks, 
and bring it down from the interior ; and also their sur- 
plus provisions, as rice and yams, and other articles, 
which they bartered for whatever they wanted, besides 
accumulating property. Mr. Austin had in his possession 
10/. to keep for one man ; and he knew a friend with 
whom as much as 300/. had been deposited by various 
individuals belonging to those settlements, the produce 
of very hard labor ; at least as hard, if not so regular, as 
the cultivation of sugar." — *' It was his father's opinion, 
as well as his own, that if his 250 slaves were emanci- 
pated, and he could place them around him as a peasan- 
try, paying rent for their houses and grounds, and having 
also wages for all the labor they did for him, he should 
be a great gainer. That he could not carry this plan 
into effect was owing to a heavy mortgage on the estate, 
comprising the slaves." 

The following account will farther show the practica- 
bility of converting negro slaves into an industrious and 
happy peasantry. During Baron Humboldt's stay in the 
valley of Aragua in Colombia, previously to the revolu- 
tion, " he was surprised to witness in every direction, 



INSTANCES OF SUCCESSFUL EMANCIPATION. 95 

not only tlie progress of agriculture, but the increase of 
a free laborious population, accustomed to toil, and too 
poor to rely on the assistance of slaves. ' Our host, ' 
(Count Tovar,) he proceeds to state, ' whose father had 
a revenue of 40,000 piastres, possessed more lands than 
he could clear; he distributed them in the valleys of 
Aragua among poor families, who chose to apply them- 
selves to the cultivation of cotton. He endeavoured to 
surround his ample plantations with freemen, who, work- 
ing as they chose, either on their own land, or in the 
neighbouring plantations, supplied him with day-laborers 
at the time of harvest. Nobly occupied on the means 
best adapted gradually to extinguish the slavery of the 
Blacks in these provinces, Count Tovar flattered himself 
with the double hope of rendering slaves less necessary 
to the landholders, and furnishing the freed-men with 
opportunities of becoming farmers. On departing for 
Europe, he had parcelled out and let a part of the lands 
of Cura, which extend toward the west at the foot of the 
rock of Las Viruelas. Four years after, at his return to 
America, he found on this spot, finely cultivated in cot- 
ton, a little hamlet of thirty or forty houses, which is 
called Piuita Zamuro, and which we afterwards visited 
with him. The inhabitants of this hamlet are almost all 
Mulattoes, Zamboes, or free Blacks. This example of 
letting out land has been happily followed by several 
other great proprietors. The rent is ten piastres for a 
vanega of ground, and is paid in money, or in cotton. 
The price of hands is cheaper here than in France. A 
freeman, working as a day-laborer (peon), is paid, in 
the valleys of Aragua, and in the Llanos, four or five 
piastres a month, not including food, which is very cheap 
on account of the abundance of meat and vegetables. I 
love to dwell on these details of colonial industry, be- 
cause they prove to the inhabitants of Europe, what to 
the enlightened inhabitants of the colonies has long 
ceased to be doubtful, that the continent of Spanish 
America can produce sugar and indigo by free hands ; 
and that the unhappy slaves are capable of becoming 
peasants, farmers, and landholders.'" (Humboldt's Pers. 
Narr., Vol. IV., pp. 126-8, cited by Mr. Conder.) 
f2 



96 INSTANCES OF SUCCESSFUL EMANCIPATION. 

The next instance I shall cite affords evidence pecu- 
liarly applicable to the state of things in our own country, 
although the number concerned was not very large. The 
authority is the best possible. 

In 1831 an order was sent out by the English govern- 
ment for the emancipation of the slaves in the West 
Indies belonging to the crown. Mr. Burge, the recent 
champion of the West Indian cause in Great Britain, 
addressed Lord Howick, under secretary for the colonies, 
in the House of Commons as follows. 

'' I wish to know whether Government took pains to 
obtain full information on the subject, before they sent 
out the order to emancipate those slaves, and particularly 
by consulting those connected with these islands'? I 
wish also to know whether any, and what steps have been 
taken for the future regulation and maintenance of those 
slaves who are to be emancipated ? The House is aware 
that at present the Crown has to pay all the expenses of 
those slaves ; but it is possible, now they have been 
emancipated, that they may become chargeable to the 
different parishes in which they reside in those islands, 
unless some provision has been made for them. I think 
that the islands should have been protected from having 
any burdens imposed on them on this account." 

Lord Howick replied, — " In answer to the questions 
of the honorable and learned gentleman, I beg to state, 
that Government did not send out or issue orders for the 
emancipation of the Crown slaves, until they had obtained 
the best information on the subject, and until that infor- 
mation had been fully considered." — " With respect to 
the results which the honorable Member seems to antici- 
pate will arise from the step that has been taken, I am 
happy in being enabled to state, that the experience of 
the past, fully warrants our pursuing the course that we 
have adopted. I trust that the precautions we have now 
taken will prove, as they did on the former occasion, 
quite unnecessary. The House is aware that, in 1828, 
orders were sent out to the island of Antigua, to emanci- 
pate the captured negroes belonging to the Crown in 
that island. This was accordingly done, and was imme- 
diately followed by a great reduction in the Government 



INSTANCES OF SUCCESSFUL EMANCIPATION. 97 

expenditure in that Colony, and at the same time no evil 
has resulted from that measure. Some years ago, the 
charge for the maintenance of the captured negroes in 
Antigua was c£8,y00 per annum ; but immediately after 
their emancipation, this expense was materially reduced, 
and I am happy to say, that it is now not more than 
^1,000 a year. This charge also will yearly decrease, 
as it is principally for the support of those who are old and 
infirm. The House will recollect too, that it is much wiser 
to emancipate those who have long been in the Colony, 
and who have been accustomed to habits of industry, 
than it was to liberate the captured negroes. If, there- 
fore, the measure carried into effect respecting the latter, 
was successful, the presumption is, that the present course 
will be attended with an equally happy result. I cannot 
let this opportunity pass without reading an extract from 
a letter written from the Governor of Antigua, on the 
subject of these Crown negroes. That gentleman says : — 
' It affords me much satisfaction in being able to state, 
that during the five months that have elapsed since the 
Crown slaves were set at liberty, there has not been a. 
single complaint of their conduct, — not a single charge 
has been brought against any one of them before a 
magistrate, — not one of them has made application for 
relief on account of poverty, or other ground ; but they 
have all been occupied industriously in providing for 
their own maintenance.' The report of the Governor of 
Antigua of the 371 captured negroes who were suddenly 
emancipated, is equally favorable. No confusion resulted 
from this comparatively large body being liberated, for I 
believe all of them were enabled to obtain employment." 

Lord Ho wick's account of the liberated Africans is 
confirmed by Mr. Loving, editor of a paper at Antigua. 

'* In 1828, there were 371 captured negroes, and 36 
Creole escheated slaves, liberated from further depen- 
dence on the Crown in the island of Antigua. I think 
the conduct of these people, since their lil)eration, a fair 
proof by which to ascertain the fitness of any colonial 
slaves for speedy emancipation. With the solitary ex- 
ception of a case of petit larceny, no others of their 
whole number have been guilty of any breach of the laws 
e3 



98 INSTANCES OF SUCCESSFUL EMANCIPATION. 

of the island down to the period when I left it ; that was 
in July, 1831, and they were pursuing an industrious 
course for their own support. Some of these Africans 
were employed by me from time to time as hodmen, 
while others, both male and female, lived in my imme- 
diate neighbourhood ; and this gave me an opportunity 
of discovering personally their industry, the avidity with 
which they coveted the possession of money and other 
property, their love of fine clothes, and the desire of 
copying, as close as possible, the dress, manners, and 
speech of the Creoles ; and in some instances, they have 
succeeded in gaining the advantage of the natives in 
these several respects. With reference to their industry, 
it is notorious, that most of the laborious work in the 
town of St. John is performed by ihem." — " Many of 
the women have become active hucksters and venders of 
dry goods and provisions in the markets ; some are house- 
maids, some laundresses, and others drudges. But the 
most remarkable facts are, that not fewer than 5 per 
cent, have purchased their own houses, including three 
freeholds ; and of the 371 who received their certificates 
of liberation, only one man and five women have re- 
turned upon the bounty of the Crown, and even these 
were obliged to do so by medical advice, because they 
were decrepit and unfit for labor." " Have you yourself 
authenticated these facts? — I have." *' Was their re- 
ligious instruction and their knowledge generally supe- 
rior to that possessed by the slaves in the island of 
Antigua? — By no means." (Commons' Report.) 

It would be easy to extend this list of instances of 
successful emancipation. But I fear to tax the patience 
of my readers. The instances already given are the 
fruit of no laborious search, and with no farther search, 
at least as many others might be added. Could I trust 
implicitly to the accounts given of Liberia by its warm 
supporters, another argument of the present fitness of the 
slaves for freedom might be obtained. It has been said, 
and I am not unwilling to believe it, that the emanci- 
pated negro appears a different being when first in free- 
dom he sets foot on the land of his fathers. But is it 
the soil or the liberty consecrating it, that causes " his 



INSTANCES OF SUCCESSFUL EMANCIPATION. 99 

soul to walk abroad in her own majesty ? " Is it in 
Africa that is found the chosen home of the power-giving 
Genius of Universal Emancipation, and in America alone 
is there a ''complexion incompatible with freedom?" 
Must the negro return to the land where his race were 
first "devoted upon the altar of slavery", that he may 
feel " his chains burst from around him," and see the 
" altar and the god sink together in the dust." 

This cannot be. A recollection of the wondrous Provi- 
dence that planted the black race in America ; a belief 
in retributive justice, and a full faith that man, whatever 
color an " Indian or an African sun may have burnt 
upon him," was made for liberty, liberty of motion, 
liberty of thought, liberty of moral agency, forbid me to 
believe it. If Liberia affords examples of suddenly eman- 
cipated slaves, and colored people who are " below the 
slaves," the dross and refuse of America, becoming use- 
ful citizens, it demonstrates all that the advocate of 
general emancipation is in justice bound to prove ; which 
is, that the character of the colored population of Amer- 
ica is no longer such, if such it has ever been, as to 
require a government of other principles than are to be 
found in the Constitution. 

The instances I have cited are enough to show how 
groundless is the unnatural belief, that slavery is essential 
for the production of any article that it is good for man 
to possess ; and also that there is nothing in the char- 
acter or condition of the negro slaves which necessarily 
forbids their being at once converted into profitable hired 
servants. I believe then that I am borne out in the con- 
clusion, that if emancipated, the blacks will adequately 
support themselves, and that the proprietors will be able 
to procure from them as great an amount of labor as they 
now do, at no greater expense. For it is certain that 
this has been the case in past instances of "emanci- 
pation, and what has been done may be done again, only 
observing and judging well the analogy of circumstan- 
ces." 

It cannot be that the blacks of republican America 
are so far behind those of Mexico and the Caraccas, of 
Cuba, Surinam, Brazil, and the Mauritius, that the rule 



Lola 



100 FITNESS OF BLACKS FOR FREEDOM. 

which applies to these last will not hold good with them. 
It is inconceivable that when Englishmen, Spaniards, 
South and Central Americans have found by ample ex- 
perience, that as a means of exciting industry in colored 
as well as white men, the hope of reward was far better 
than the fear of punishment ; that a principle so accor- 
dant with the fundamental laws of human nature should 
completely fail in its application here. When the Ameri- 
can slave-holder, then, in answer to all argument, and 
in objection to seeming proofs, points to the slaves he 
has emancipated and to their descendants in the United 
States, and says, they are drones and nuisances, and will 
never work for hire, I say, that if this be true, the cause 
must be found in some local and secondary circum- 
stances, and not in the essential one of their being 
freemen. 

If the character and condition of the free people of 
color of this country affords any argument against eman- 
cipation, it is to be observed that it affords an argument 
of equal force against emancipation in every mode. The 
progress of emancipation in the United States has cer- 
tainly been as measured as the most strenuous gradualist 
could desire. It has hitherto taken place, as it has occa- 
sionally taken place in all countries where slavery has " 
prevailed. Some have purchased their freedom by the 
sweat of their own brows ; some have obtained it by 
bequest from their dying masters ; and some by a speedier 
liberality. Others have become free either at birth, or 
some subsequent period of life, by the operation of laws 
for the gradual extinction of slavery. If, under these 
various circumstances, freedom has proved a fatal gift to 
the man of African descent, what hope is there that 
slavery will ever be removed from us. Must we not infer 
that the man who has once been a slave can never be a 
freeman, or else that the dark sons of the equator were 
born only to be " hewers of wood and drawers of water" 
to their more fortunate brethren of the European stock. 
I can see no other alternative. And it needs but a glance 
at the laws and prevalent tone of sentiment in many of the 
slaveholding States, to be convinced that one or the other 
or both of these opinions have practically been adopted by 



FITNESS OF BLACKS FOR FREEDOM. 101 

them. Is it not said that the present system of governing tlie 
blacks, is one '' admirably adapted to their natural charac- 
ter and capacity ? " Do not many, perhaps the majority, 
think it vain to "look forward to the time when, however 
desirable it may be in abstract speculation, involuntary 
servitude shall entirely cease ? " Is not the chief thought 
of the people of many of the States, how slavery shall be 
made safe and best be perj^Jetuated, and is not the whole 
system of the laws and practice directed to this one end '( 
I say, without fear of contradiction, that through the 
greater part of the United States emancipation is not 
sincerely desired. Some may wish to get rid of slavery, 
but only in case they can get rid of their slaves at the 
same time. Few see much chance of this, and conse- 
quently they fold their arms, and resolve to go on in their 
present course. Satisfied that a mixed system of slavery 
and liberty for the blacks cannot be a lasting one, they 
have resolved on adhering to the present one of slavery, 
making it as pure as the spirit of the times will admit, 
for so only can it be preserved. Hence all the laws for- 
bidding manumissions, and those prohibiting all but oral 
instruction of the slaves, which of course, except in rare 
instances, must result in depriving them of all instruction 
whatever. 

What a contrast to this course is presented by the policy 
of the monarchical governments of Spain, Portugal, and 
Brazil. Under their empires liberty is a possible attainment 
to every slave. Never forgetting that the slave is a man, 
they do not permit his master's claims to interfere with 
those of his intellect and soul, if, indeed, to their more 
liberal apprehension, these ever appear at variance. Never 
losing sight of the essential wrong of slavery, they in- 
sure its ultimate extinction, simply by departing so far 
from its principles as recognise in the slave and secure 
to him the right of property. This is doubtless an in- 
terference with the rights of the master, for as the code 
of Louisiana says, the slave can " possess nothing and 
acquire nothing but what must belong to his master," 
and such is the lawful deduction from tlie principles of 
the institution. The indulgence thus allowed the slave 
must be regarded, as in fact it is, a decided step towards 



102 FITNESS OF BLACKS FOR FREEDOM. 

final emancipation. In any State where it is permitted, 
the abolition of slavery has begun, and the period of its 
extinction, if slaves be not introduced from without, may 
fairly be calculated.* 

Wherever this practice of allowing the slave to enter 
the market as a purchaser of himself prevails, but not 
elsewhere, can it be said that slavery is an institution 
containing the elements of its own dissolution. Where 
it does prevail, however, there being no obstruction to 
the operation of some of the first principles of human 
nature in the slave, the extinction of slavery within a 
limited period is insured. Aware of this, no slaveholding 
States will admit this amelioration of slavery, until they 
shall have become reconciled to the ultimate abolition 
of the system. Hence the restrictive policy with regard 
to the holding of property by slaves, which marks the 
slaveholding governments of North America, the Federal 
government among the rest. 

* " It is hardly necessary," says Brougham, " to remark the 
striking analogy between the state of the Spanish and Portuguese 
negroes, and that of the* European bondsmen, at a certain period of 
their progress towards liberty." In some respects, he adds, " the 
negro is even in a more favoi-able situation," in others in one less 
so, " Both situations have in common the great points of a bargain 
between the master and slave ; privileges possessed by the slave, 
independent of, nay in opposition to his master ; the rights of 
property enjoyed by the slave, and the power of purchasing his 
freedom at a just price." (Colonial Policy, Vol. II. pp. 514, 51.5.) 

An authentic account of the law and practice in the Spanish colo- 
nies, respecting the manumission of slaves, was furnished to Mr. Can- 
ning by Mr. Kilbee, Commissioner at Havana, in a communication 
presented to Parliament in 1825. An abstract of this document 
may be found in a Supplement to the Number of the Anti-Slavery 
Reporter for June 1828. 

The great advantages possessed by the slaves under the Spanish 
government over those of the United States need not be farther 
pointed out. 



APPENDIX. 



The view given of emancipation on pages 27, 28, is 
partial and incorrect, and the distinction made between 
emancipation and enfranchisement, on the whole, trifling. 
Emancipation may be gradual with respect to indi- 
viduals as well as to numbers. Slavery essentially, or to 
use an expression that has been the source of much abuse, 
slavery in the abstract, implying the total deprivation of 
all the natural rights, by subjection to an absolute and 
arbitrary master, may cease gradually by the successive 
restoration of these rights. The bondsmen of Western 
Europe were many of them emancipated in this manner. 
The negro slaves in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies 
are by the same rule at this time partially emancipated. 
The acknowledgment of the slaves' right of life in the 
laws of the United States is to be regarded as emancipa- 
tion quoad hoc. 

The term gradual is however often used in the sense 
given in the paragraphs above referred to. In this sense 
was the abolition of slavery in New York and Pennsyl- 
vania gradual. (See Stroud's Chapter on the Laws for 
the Abolition of Slavery.) To this sort of gradual eman- 
cipation the remarks heretofore made are perfectly appli- 
cable. Objections of a similar nature lie against gradual 
emancipation in the other sense of the term. The slave's 
claim is equally good to the possession of every one of 
his rights. If one can in justice be totally withheld, why 
may not all ? 

Much hypercriticism and false criticism has been 
expended upon the definition of slavery given by Mr. 
Phelps in his work on slavery. Mine is subject to the 
same or similar objections. We have not at this day, how- 



104 APPENDIX. 

ever, to define slavery anew. I have quoted one or two 
definitions, which substantiate the correctness of my own. 
If doubt still remains, we have only to go back to the 
origin of slavery among the ancients, or to the African 
trade, which has afforded its supply to Christian nations. 

That the slave is essentially regarded by the institution 
under which he is held, as a mere animal of burden, 
held as property, just as truly as " brood mares," might 
easily be shown. I have neither time nor inclination at 
present to enter into the discussion. But the reader 
may be referred to Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Judge 
Tucker's note on Slavery in his edition of Blackstone ; 
also to any general treatise on the subject ; such, for 
example, as that in the Conversations Lexicon, translated 
by Lieber ; and to the laws of slavery in all the different 
slaveholding States of Christendom. 

Emancipation from domestic servitude has no reference 
to the kind or degree of civil liberty conferred. It merely 
denotes the removal of the arbitrary control of one man 
over the acts of another. It ensures civil liberty by 
declaring the slave amenable to no other authority than 
that of the laws. It is complete when all claim of prop- 
erty in the person of the slave is abandoned, and not 
until then. If the public good requires that the present 
negro slaves should continue to be restricted in the en- 
joyment of natural liberty, there is nothing in their being 
declared not '' chattels," which can prevent it. For by 
the very definition of civil liberty, already quoted, some re- 
straint is implied. But no natural right can be annulled. 

The words " immediate emancipation " are used in 
precisely the same sense by the abolitionists of this coun- 
try and in England. There it was understood to consist 
simply in the annihilation of the right of property in 
man, and in the full recognition of a natural right in 
the slave to the enjoyment of personal security, personal 
liberty, and ptritmte ptroperty. Their full recognition, I 
say. If in all organi:^ed society the natural rights of 
individuals are restrained, they are also unequally re- 
strained. But none of them can be wholly abrogated 
without violating the principle which lies at the founda- 
tion of all society. Whether or not in theory, slavery 



APPENDIX. 105 

implies such a violation cannot, at the present day, be a 
question, although if we are to judge from late newspaper 
demonstrations, some Americans are disposed to consider 
it still a moot case. Nor can it be denied, that the slave 
laws of this Union bring slavery here as near to perfect 
slavery, as it has ever been seen since the days of the 
Roman Republic. 



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